With the research and development of miniaturised technologies, the controllable wettability of surfaces for micro fluidic modules as well as in medical diagnostics in the pico- to microlitre range is becoming increasingly important. In particular, the use of stimuli-responsive polymer brushes, with their unusual behavioural pattern and systems whose properties can be modified by structural modi-fication (brush/network) or by additional chemical variation to form multi-responsive systems are of interest for the creation of gradient surfaces. At the beginning of this work, the in fluence of swelling phenomena caused by solvents and their vapour phase on the dynamic wetting of flexible, adaptive and switchable swellable polymer systems, such as poly-N-isopropylacrylamide brushes/networks, was largely unknown. For this purpose, concentrated polymer brushes of maximum molar mass were realised by surfaceinitiated atom transfer radical polymerisation by grafting-from. These showed a strong basic stretching of the polymer chains of 40% of the contour length. The system under consideration showed no causal relationship between the degree of swelling or wetting behaviour and the molar mass of the bonded polymer brushes when the relative humidity and layer thickness were varied. Due to the decrease of the water vapour diffusion resistance with increasing RH for hydrophilic polymers, a molar massdependent difference in water incorporation with increasing humidity was observed in absolute terms. However, the ratio of absorbed water to polymer segment remains constant with increasing molar mass. It was found that the PNIPAm brushes reached a maximum elongation of 47% (90% rH) with increasing relative humidity. Comparing this course to the schematic course of the sorption isotherm of an organic polymer indicates that in the case of the present concentrated PNIPAm brushes a maximum degree of swelling of 1.2 with on average 47% stretching of the brush cannot be exceeded by water vapour absorption, whereas a stretching of 65% was observed under solvent influence. The wetting behaviour of the three-phase contact line and the associated radius of a lying drop as a function of time at different relative humidities showed, compared to the uncoated reference substrate,a highly dynamic behaviour on PNIPAm coated substrates in all wetting profiles. Those finite drop radiuses are reached with a clear delay at the same drop volume and thus show a significantly slower spreading behaviour independent of the relative humidity. Contrary to the assumption, it turned out that Tanner's law does not apply and the significantly slower spreading cannot be described exclusively by the equilibrium state of the applied droplet on PNIPAm brushes. In this context, numerical approximations and application of the experimentally determined capillary number as a function of the contact angle showed that the slower spreading process is determined by the imbibition/swelling forces acting in addition to the capillary pressure. Measurements in a quasi-steady state confirmed the assumption of the influence of swelling forces and imbibition processes by observing capillaries coated with PNIPAm brushes, which showed much lower capillary forces than expected. In conclusion, it can be stated that, assuming a constant ratio between the amount of water absorbed and the polymer segment, the molar mass is not a suitable parameter to modulate transport by variation, for example. Similarly, a colour-peaking radius beyond the three-phase contactline was observed around the applied droplet. Investigation of the observed coloured area beyond the three-phase contact line showed that it is a precursor film caused by imbibition and can be divided into two regimes. The polymer brushes close to the droplets at the three-phase boundary, on the other hand, showed a stretching in the opposite direction to the entropy, which therefore forms a bridge to the fluid-gas contact line of the droplet and, in combination with investigations on the stick-slip behaviour, refers to the bridge effect postulated by Cohen-Stuart et al. Furthermore, it could be shown that fine structures can be produced by adjacent polymer brushes in contact and polymer networks a gradient surface with directed fluid flow.