Concepts of Rehbinder's school and modern theories of spreading

Pioneering experimental and theoretical investigations of spontaneous sprea ding were begun in the early 1960s at the Colloid Chemistry Department of t he Moscow State University, i.e. when the phenomenon under discussion had b een poorly investigated and understood. The present review represents an at tempt towards a unified picture of spreading theory directions relating to ideas and works of academician Rehbinder, his colleagues and disciples. Bei ng the founder of the hydrodynamic theory of spreading, Rehbinder's school has put, at the same time, a special emphasis on the influence of physicoch emical factors on spreading processes. So, Rehbinder's school has developed or, at least, anticipated many modern theoretical concepts concerning meth ods of irreversible thermodynamics and similarity theory. Among theoretical approaches to spreading dynamics, computer simulation methods are the most adequate to study kinetics and molecular mechanisms of microdroplet spread ing. The first efforts in this direction were made over 20 years ago by Reh binder's disciples Shchukin and Yushchenko. The up-to-date results relating to application of computer simulation methods to spreading kinetics are al so presented in this review. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights rese rved.