Nanodrop contact angles from molecular dynamics simulations

The contact angle between three phases being in thermodynamic equilibrium is highly sensitive to the nature of the intermolecular forces as well as to various fluctuation effects. Determining the Young contact angle of a sessile drop sitting on a substrate from molecular dynamics (MD) simulations is a highly non-trivial task. Most commonly employed methods for finding droplet contact angles from MD simulation data either require large numbers of particles or are system-dependent. We propose a systematic geometry based methodology for extracting the contact angle from simulated sessile droplets by analysing an appropriately coarse-grained density field. To demonstrate the method, we consider Lennard-Jones (LJ) and SPC/E water nanodroplets of different sizes sitting on planar LJ walls. Our results are in good agreement with Young contact angle values computed employing test-area perturbation method.