Vegetable oils are mainly used in the heat treating industry due to their environmental friendliness. In the present work the effect of surface roughness on spreading of vegetable oils on stainless steel substrates was investigated. Spreading phenomenon was digitally recorded and analyzed. All of the oils under investigation exhibited power law spreading behaviour of the type: A = kt n , where A, t, k and n represent the drop base contact area, spreading time, constant and exponent, respectively. The coconut and sunflower oils exhibited accelerated kinetics owing to their lower viscosity as compared to palm and mineral oils while peanut oil showed intermediate behaviour. Viscous regime was dominant during spreading of mineral and palm oils as compared to that of coconut oil. All the oils took longer period of time on rough surfaces than on smooth surfaces to relax to the same degree of wetting. Oils spreading on rough surfaces had to overcome the additional barrier due to asperities of the rough surface. Contact angle decreased with increase in roughness supporting the Wenzel's proposition. The decrease was significant for increase in roughness from 0.25 lm to 0.50 lm for all oils.
However, the effect was negligible with further increase in roughness particularly for high viscosity oils. A spread parameter (w) is proposed to account for the variation of contact angle with surface roughness of the substrate and momentum diffusivity of the spreading liquid. The result suggested that low viscosity liquids exhibit improved wetting characteristics during spreading on rough surfaces. A model is proposed to estimate dynamic contact angles on substrates having varying surface roughness.