Standard Practice for Surface Wettability of Coatings, Substrates and Pigments by Advancing Contact Angle Measurement

5.1 This standard is useful for characterizing the wettability of surfaces. A surface that is easy to wet is one over which a coating is more likely to give good adhesion and appearance and less likely to suffer surface tension related defects such as crawling, cratering, pinholing and orange peel.

5.2 This standard also can be used to test pigment surfaces for wettability, particularly by potential surfactant- or resin-based dispersants or mill bases. Easily wetted pigments are more likely to be easy to disperse and dispersants/mill bases that wet pigments of interest are more likely to disperse those pigments well.

5.3 Although the contact angle is governed by the surface tensions of the test liquid and test surface, the angle cannot provide a surface tension value directly.

5.4 A low advancing contact angle value (<45°) is indicative of wetting and angles of 10 to 20º are indicative of excellent wetting.

5.5 Water can be used as a test liquid to establish (via the advancing contact angle) whether a surface is hydrophilic (angle <45º), hydrophobic (angle > 90º) or somewhere in-between (angle of 45 to 90º). Water contact angles have been used to estimate surface cleanliness before and after cleaning operations, ease of wettability of surfaces by waterborne coatings and the effectiveness of rinsing processes.

5.6 An organic liquid such as a solvent also can be used to characterize a substrate, coating or pigment. The resultant contact angle will depend on the surface tensions of the liquid and the test surface. A low surface tension (energy) test surface will not be wet by a high surface tension liquid.

5.7 In addition to water and solvents, a surfactant dispersion or dispersant solution can be used to test a pigment surface. Any test liquid that is a potential dispersant for a test pigment must wet the pigment well or it will not work as a dispersant.

5.8 Contact angle measurements can be used to map surfaces in terms of hydrophilicity, presence of low surface tension components or contaminants, or variations in composition. Other analytical methods such as infrared microscopy would be needed to identify the chemical moieties that give the contact angle differences.

5.9 This test method can be used on nearly all coatings and substrates and may be extended to pigments by compressing the pigment powder into a solid disk.