Related papers: Electrostatics in wind-blown sand
Wind-blown sand, or 'saltation,' creates sand dunes, erodes geological features, and could be a significant source of dust aerosols on Mars. Moreover, the electrification of sand and dust in saltation, dust storms, and dust devils could…
Wind-blown sand, or "saltation", ejects dust aerosols into the atmosphere, creates sand dunes, and erodes geological features. We present a comprehensive numerical model of steady-state saltation that, in contrast to most previous studies,…
The transport of sand and dust by wind is a potent erosional force, creates sand dunes and ripples, and loads the atmosphere with suspended dust aerosols. This article presents an extensive review of the physics of wind-blown sand and dust…
Surfaces of planetary bodies can have strong electric fields, subjecting conductive grains to repulsive electrostatic forces. This has been proposed as mechanism to eject grains from the ground. To quantify this process, we study mm-sized…
We present an analytical model of aeolian sand transport. The model quantifies the momentum transfer from the wind to the transported sand by providing expressions for the thickness of the saltation layer and the apparent surface roughness.…
Sandstorms are frequently accompanied by the generation of intense electric fields and lightning. In a very narrow region close to the ground level, sand particles undergo a charge exchange mechanism whereby larger (resp. smaller) sized…
Wind-driven sand transport generates atmospheric dust, forms dunes, and sculpts landscapes. However, it remains unclear how the sand flux scales with wind speed, largely because models do not agree on how particle speed changes with wind…
It is a long-standing open question whether electrification of wind-blown sand due to tribocharging - the generation of electric charges on the surface of sand grains by particle-particle collisions - could affect rates of sand transport…
Natural wind-eroded soils contain a mixture of particle sizes. However, models for aeolian saltation are typically derived for sediment bed surfaces containing only a single particle size. To nonetheless treat natural mixed beds, models for…
Dust and sand motion are a common sight on Mars. Understanding the interaction of atmosphere and Martian soil is fundamental to describe the planet's weather, climate and surface morphology. We set up a wind tunnel to study the lift of a…
The wind-driven hopping motion of sand grains, known as saltation, forms dunes and ripples and ejects fine dust particles into the atmosphere on both Earth and Mars. While the wind speed at which saltation is initiated, the fluid threshold,…
Reliably predicting the geomorphology and climate of planetary bodies requires knowledge of the dynamic threshold wind shear velocity below which saltation transport ceases. Here we measure this threshold in a wind tunnel for four…
Certain forms of solar wind transients contain significant enhancements of dynamic pressure and may effectively drive magnetosphere dynamics, including substorms and storms. An integral element of such driving is the generation of a wide…
Predicting transport rates of windblown sand is a central problem in aeolian research, with implications for climate, environmental, and planetary sciences. Though studied since the 1930s, the underlying many-body dynamics is still…
There has been important understanding of the process by which a hypersonic dust impact makes an electrical signal on a spacecraft sensor, leading to a fuller understanding of the physics. Zaslavsky (2015) showed that the most important…
Much of the surface of Mars is covered by dunes, ripples, and other features formed by the blowing of sand by wind, known as saltation. In addition, saltation loads the atmosphere with dust aerosols, which dominate the Martian climate. We…
Wind-blown sand and dust models depend sensitively on the threshold wind stress. However, laboratory and numerical experiments suggest the coexistence of distinct "fluid" and "impact" thresholds for the initiation and cessation of aeolian…
Jamming is a phenomenon occurring in systems as diverse as traffic, colloidal suspensions and granular materials. A theory on the reversible elastic deformation of jammed states is presented. First, an explicit granular stress-strain…
Starting from the physics on the grain scale, we develop a simple continuum description of aeolian sand transport. Beyond popular mean-field models, but without sacrificing their computational efficiency, it accounts for both dominant grain…
We derive a phenomenological continuum saltation model for aeolian sand transport that can serve as an efficient tool for geomorphological applications. The coupled differential equations for the average density and velocity of sand in the…