The spontaneous spreading of small liquid droplets on solid surfaces is examined with the objective of developing closed‐form expressions for the spreading dynamics, both for the case in which there is complete equilibrium spreading, that is the equilibrium contact angle is 0°, and for the case in which equilibrium spreading is incomplete. Such solutions are obtained using a simple hydrodynamic model. The results are consistent with the format of the universal Hoffman–Voinov–Tanner law (for complete spreading) and the modified Hoffman–Voinov–Tanner law for incomplete spreading. In the latter case, concurrence is found only when the dynamic contact angle is close to the equilibrium angle throughout the spreading process.
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Seaver et al. (1994) studied this question.