Protection from windblown-sand is one of the key engineering issues for construction and maintenance of human infrastructures in arid environments. In the last century, several barriers with different shapes have been proposed in order to overcome this problem, but literature lacks of a systematic performance quantitative analysis, and the key geometric parameters that promote sedimentation have not been yet recognized. A deep understanding of the aerodynamics effects of sand barrier on the flow is an unavoidable step to achieve these objectives. The present computational study aims to comparatively analyze different kinds of windblown sand mitigation solid barriers, clarify their working principles, extract from the aerodynamics analysis key geometrical features of the barriers and relate them to the sand trapping performances. Approximated metrics for performance assessment are introduced using aerodynamic parameters. The performances of an innovative solid barrier and the ones of commonly used solid barriers are compared in terms of these metrics. The effects of incoming wind velocity profiles on sand trapping performances are evaluated as well. An empirical dimensionless performance estimator is proposed and used to provide general design guidelines.
Avalanching plays a crucial role in granular materials dynamics, in particular in the evolution of the shape of the leeward side of sand dunes. This paper presents a physically-based mathematical model capable of reproducing the kinematic evolution of the surface of sand piles and to obtain eventually the stationary configurations, in the presence of external sources as well. Simulation results with different boundary conditions and geometries are reported in order to show the high flexibility of the model. The model is also validated by means of comparison with the experimental results of different authors.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.