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Improved analytical model for the relaxation process of aeolian sand transport

  • Regular Article – Flowing Matter
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Abstract

The process from the initial sand movement to sand flux saturation is described as the relaxation of aeolian sand transport. For this relaxation process, most existing models distinguish the conditions with and without upwind sand flux, therefore lacking in generality. An improved analytical model is proposed in this paper, which incorporates the phenomena of “overshoot” and “equilibrium” and the concept of the region of initiation by fluid, and is able to unify the cases with and without upwind sand flux. Within the proposed model, a new definition of the saturation length is proposed based on the analogy between two damping oscillation models, and its constancy is physically interpreted and verified with wind tunnel experimental data. In comparison with the existing models, the proposed model agrees better with the measurements of the process of sand transport, thereby shedding light on the understanding of aeolian sand transport under complex circumstances.

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Acknowledgements

Data is available through Bagnold (1941), Shao and Raupach (1992), Andreotti et al. (2010), and Selmani et al. (2018). The authors gratefully acknowledge the support provided by National Natural Science Foundation of China (11402190), Key Research and Development Program of Shaanxi Province (2021GY-150), Shaanxi Province Natural Science Foundation Research Project (2019JQ-304), and Wisteria Scientific Research Cooperation Special Project (Grant No. XM06190109). The authors thank Dr. Xiaosi Zhou for his advices.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Chemical Engineering, Northwest University, Xi’an, China

    Bin Yang, Yuxin Liu, Bo Zhang & Yuanwei Lin

  2. School of Energy and Power Engineering, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an, China

    Bo Zhang, Yuanwei Lin & Yang Zhang

Authors
  1. Bin Yang
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  2. Yuxin Liu
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  3. Bo Zhang
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  4. Yuanwei Lin
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  5. Yang Zhang
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Contributions

BY, YL and BZ conceived the idea and performed the writing. YL and YZ conducted the data analysis. YZ organized the paper structure and the revision. All the authors contributed to the discussion of the results.

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Correspondence to Yang Zhang.

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Yang, B., Liu, Y., Zhang, B. et al. Improved analytical model for the relaxation process of aeolian sand transport. Eur. Phys. J. E 44, 116 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1140/epje/s10189-021-00125-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1140/epje/s10189-021-00125-7

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