 A well-known departure from ideality is when the surface of interest has a rough texture. The rough texture of a surface can fall into one of two categories: homogeneous or heterogeneous. A homogeneous wetting regime is where the liquid fills in the roughness grooves of a surface. A heterogeneous wetting regime, though, is where the surface is a composite of two types of patches. An important example of such a composite surface is one composed of patches of both air and solid. Such surfaces have varied effects on the contact angles of wetting liquids. Cassie – Baxter and Wenzel are the two main models that attempt to describe the wetting of textured surfaces. However, these equations only apply when the drop size is sufficiently large compared with the surface roughness scale. When the droplet size is comparable to that of the underlying pillars, the effect of line tension should be considered. .
