A liquid drop impacting a dry solid surface with sufficient kinetic energywill splash, breaking apart into numerous secondary droplets. This phenomenonshows many similarities to forced wetting, including the entrainment of air atthe contact line. Because of these similarities and the fact that forcedwetting has been shown to depend on the wetting properties of the surface,existing theories predict splashing to depend on wetting properties as well.However, using high-speed interference imaging we observe that wettingproperties have no effect on splashing for various liquid-surface combinations.Additionally, by fully resolving the Navier-Stokes equations at length and timescales inaccessible to experiments, we find that the shape and motion of theair-liquid interface at the contact line are independent of wettability. We usethese findings to evaluate existing theories and to compare splashing withforced wetting.
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