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Evolution of crescent-shaped sand dune under the influence of injected sand flux: scaling law and wind tunnel experiment

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Abstract

This paper studies the evolution of crescent-shaped dune under the influence of injected flux. A scaling law and a wind tunnel experiment are carried out for comparison. The experiment incorporates a novel image processing algorithm to recover the evolutionary process. The theoretical and experimental results agree well in the middle stage of dune evolution, but deviate from each other in the initial and final stages, suggesting that the crescent-shaped dune evolution is intrinsically scale-variant and that the crescent shape breaks down under unsaturated condition.

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Acknowledgments

This work is funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (11402190), the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (2014M552443), and the Natural Science Foundation of Shaanxi Province (2013JQ2001).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Fluid Machinery and Engineering, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an, 710049, China

    Yang Zhang, Yuan Wang & Xiaosi Zhou

  2. School of Chemical Engineering, Northwest University, Xi’an, 710069, China

    Bin Yang

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  1. Yang Zhang
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  2. Yuan Wang
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  3. Xiaosi Zhou
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  4. Bin Yang
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Correspondence to Yuan Wang.

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Zhang, Y., Wang, Y., Zhou, X. et al. Evolution of crescent-shaped sand dune under the influence of injected sand flux: scaling law and wind tunnel experiment. J. Arid Land 9, 270–277 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40333-017-0005-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40333-017-0005-7

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