Analysis of sand particles’ lift-off and incident velocities in wind-blown sand flux

In the research of windblown sand movement,the lift-off and incident velocities of saltating sand particles play a significant role in bridging the spatial and temporal scales from single sand particle＇s motion to windblown sand flux.In this paper,we achieved wind tunnel measurements of the movement of sand particles near sand bed through improving the wind tunnel experimental scheme of paticle image velocimetry（PIV） and data processing method.And then the influence of observation height on the probability distributions of lift-off and incident velocities of sand particles was analyzed.The results demonstrate that the observation height has no obvious influence on the distribution pattern of the lift-off and incident velocities of sand particles,i.e.,the probability distribution of horizontal and vertical velocities of lift-off and incident sand particles follow a Gaussian distribution and a negative exponential distribution,respectively.However,it influences the center of the Gaussian distribution,the decay constant and the amplitude of the negative exponential distribution.

Discrete particle simulation of mixed sand transport

An Eulerian/Lagrangian numerical simulation is performed on mixed sand transport. Volume averaged Navier-Stokes equations are solved to calculate gas motion, and particle motion is calculated using Newton＇s equation, involving a hard sphere model to describe particle-to-particle and particle-to-wall collisions. The influence of wall characteristics, size distribution of sand particles and boundary layer depth on vertical distribution of sand mass flux and particle mean horizontal velocity is analyzed, suggesting that all these three factors affect sand transport at different levels. In all cases, for small size groups, sand mass flux first increases with height and then decreases while for large size groups, it decreases exponen- tially with height and for middle size groups the behavior is in-between. The mean horizontal velocity for all size groups well fits experimental data, that is, increasing logarithmically with height in the middle height region. Wall characteristics greatly affects particle to wall collision and makes the fiat bed similar to a Gobi surface and the rough bed similar to a sandy surface. Particle size distribution largely affects the sand mass flux and the highest heights they can reach especially for larger particles.