{"id":221717,"date":"2025-09-11T04:34:13","date_gmt":"2025-09-11T09:34:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/09\/why-tiny-droplets-stick-or-bounce-the-physics-of-speed-and-size"},"modified":"2025-09-11T04:34:13","modified_gmt":"2025-09-11T09:34:13","slug":"why-tiny-droplets-stick-or-bounce-the-physics-of-speed-and-size","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/09\/why-tiny-droplets-stick-or-bounce-the-physics-of-speed-and-size","title":{"rendered":"Why tiny droplets stick or bounce: The physics of speed and size"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/why-tiny-droplets-stick-or-bounce-the-physics-of-speed-and-size.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>When a droplet of liquid the size of a grain of icing sugar hits a water-repelling surface, like plastics or certain plant leaves, it can meet one of two fates: stick or bounce. Until now, scientists thought bouncing depended only on how repellent the surface was and how the droplet lost its impact energy. Speed, they assumed, didn\u2019t matter.<\/p>\n<p>Now, new research published in the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.pnas.org\/doi\/10.1073\/pnas.2507309122\" target=\"_blank\"><i>Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences<\/i><\/a>, shows that speed is actually the deciding factor\u2014and that <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/droplets\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">droplets<\/a> only bounce within a \u201cGoldilocks zone,\u201d or just the right speed range.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cBouncing only happens in a very narrow speed window,\u201d said Jamie McLauchlan, first author of the study and Ph.D. student at the University of Bath.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>When a droplet of liquid the size of a grain of icing sugar hits a water-repelling surface, like plastics or certain plant leaves, it can meet one of two fates: stick or bounce. Until now, scientists thought bouncing depended only on how repellent the surface was and how the droplet lost its impact energy. Speed, [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1497,219],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-221717","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-energy","category-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/221717","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=221717"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/221717\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=221717"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=221717"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=221717"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}