文摘
Surface tension effects are dominant in miniaturization. Therefore, a lot of capillary forces models have beenrecently discussed in the literature. The work reported in this paper intends to prove the equivalence between twomethods which are very widespread in capillary forces computation at equilibrium: the energetic method based onthe derivation of the total interfacial energy and a second method summing both pressure and tension terms obtainedfrom the meniscus profile (based on the Laplace equation). The results are supported by different qualitative arguments,an analytical proof in the case of a prism-plate configuration, numerical simulation, and experiments in the case oftwo millimetric spheres.