Micropatterned materials are important in the construction of superhydrophobic surfaces for drag reduction and protective coatings. A new generation of these materials incorporates a layer of immiscible fluid into the surface pattern to enhance or customize the surface mechanical behavior. When such liquid-infused surfaces are exposed to an external shear flow, there is a risk of losing the infused liquid, and thus designing surface structures capable of retaining fluid under shear becomes important.
In this work, theoretical calculations and experiments will be presented to describe the steady-state fluid retention in an open microfluidic channel under shear, as a function of the streamwise geometry of the channel.
