Oil-in-water emulsions, stabilised with conventional surfactants, are commonly used in eye drops for ocular drug delivery. However, the presence of surfactants can sometimes irritate tissues. Furthermore, conventional emulsions often have...

The shape of a liquid–air interface advancing on a heterogeneous surface was studied experimentally, together with the force induced by the pinning of the contact line to surface defects. Different surfaces were considered with circular defects introduced as arrays of cocoa butter patches or small circular holes. These heterogeneous surfaces were submerged in aqueous ethanol solutions while measuring the additional force arising from the deformation of the advancing contact line and characterizing the interface shape and its pinning on the defects. Initially, the submersion force is linear with submerged depth, suggesting a constant defect-induced stiffness. This regime ends when the contact line depins from the defects. A simple scaling is proposed to describe the depinning force and the depinning energy. As the defect separation increases, the interface stiffness is found to increase too, with a weak dependency on the defect radius. This interaction between defects cannot be captured by simple scaling but can be well predicted by a theory considering the interface deformation in the presence of a periodic arrays of holes. Creating a four-phase contact line by including solid defects (cocoa butter) reduced pinning forces. The radius of the defect had a nonlinear effect on the depinning depth. The four-phase contact line resulted in depinning before the defects were fully submerged. These experimental results and the associated theory help to understand quantitatively the extent to which surface heterogeneities can slow down wetting. This in turn paves the way to tailoring the design of heterogeneous surfaces toward desired wetting performances.