Integrated Hydrophobic and Hydrophilic substrate by Nanopatterned Surfaces

While looking for articles I stumbled across a paper

(Hyunjong Jin; Hsiao, A.; Liu, L.; , "Integrated hydrophobic and hydrophilic substrate by nanopatterned surfaces," Sensors, 2010 IEEE , vol., no., pp.1364-1367, 1-4 Nov. 2010)

 where a group created hydrophobic and hydrophilic areas on a single substrate sample by treating each area with different methods.  Something that I found interesting which may or may not apply to our project down the road was the variability of the hydrophobic nature of the sample and that a "difference in contact angle is mainly due to the ability of the nanotexture surface having more channels for water to [leak] in".  I am fairly new to the concept of a contact angle but from my understanding of the paper, by adding channels to our sample to create terraces and troughs we are changing the hydrophobic nature of the sample from a mechanical standpoint.  So if we perform our experiments on both hydrophobic and hydrophilic substrates we may need to make sure that we have considered the effects of changing the substrate's interaction with the solvent, water, in both a chemical and mechanical form when analyzing the differences in our data.