Past exam of the MPhil in micro- and nanotechnology enterprise course of the University of Cambridge / 2017 / Paper 2 / Section A(i) / 13 / ii / Solution

The Winterbottom construction extends the Wulff construction to a crystal supported on a substrate. It includes the particle-substrate interfacial energy and the substrate surface energy displaced by contact, so the equilibrium Wulff body is truncated by the support plane. The relevant contact contribution is $({\gamma }_{ps}-{\gamma }_s)A_{\mathrm{contact}}$; it determines wetting and contact geometry. The basic unsupported construction accounts only for orientation-dependent free surface energies.^[ref]