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

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Abstract

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 particle 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.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Key Laboratory of Mechanics on Western Disaster and Environment, Department of Mechanics, Lanzhou University, 730000, Lanzhou, China

    Tian-Li Bo, Xiao-Jing Zheng, Shao-Zhen Duan & Yi-Rui Liang

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  1. Tian-Li Bo
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  2. Xiao-Jing Zheng
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  3. Shao-Zhen Duan
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  4. Yi-Rui Liang
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Additional information

The project was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (11072097, 11232006, 11202088, 10972164 and 11121202), the Science Foundation of Ministry of Education of China (308022), Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (lzujbky-2009-k01), and the Project of the Ministry of Science and Technology of China (2009CB421304).

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Bo, TL., Zheng, XJ., Duan, SZ. et al. Analysis of sand particles’ lift-off and incident velocities in wind-blown sand flux. Acta Mech Sin 29, 158–165 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10409-013-0020-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10409-013-0020-7

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