Related papers: Modelling formation and evolution of transverse du…

It is widely accepted that both ripples and dunes form in rivers by primary linear instability, the wavelength of the former scaling on the grain size, that of the latter being controled by the water depth. We revisit here this problem,…

Beautiful dune patterns can be found in deserts and along coasts due to the instability of a plain sheet of sand under the action of the wind. Barchan dunes are highly mobile aeolian dunes found in areas of low sand availability and…

We observed time evolution of dune fields in a water tank experiment and simulated it by using a simple model without taking complex fluid dynamics into account. The initial sand bed changed its form into transverse ripples, that is, dunes…

Vegetation is the most common and most reliable stabilizer of loose soil or sand. This ancient technique is for the first time cast into a set of equations of motion describing the competition between aeolian sand transport and vegetation…

Sand patches are one of the precursors to early-stage protodunes and occur widely in both desert and coastal aeolian environments. Here we show field evidence of a mechanism to explain the initiation of sand patches on non-erodible…

Sand dunes are ubiquitous in nature, and are found in abundance on Earth and other planetary environments. One of the most common types are crescent-shaped dunes known as barchans, whose mid-line could be assumed to behave as 2D dunes. In…

We investigate flow separation in the air flow over transverse sand dunes. CFD simulations of the air flow over differently shaped dunes are performed. The length of the recirculation region after the brink of the dune is found to depend…

In several desert areas, the slow motion of sand dunes can be a challenge for modern human activities and a threat for the survival of ancient places or archaeological sites. However, several methods exist for surveying the dune fields and…

We demonstrate the feasibility of studying dunes in a laboratory experiment. It is shown that an initial sand pile, under a wind flow carrying sand, flattens and gets a shape recalling barchan dunes. An evolution law is proposed for the…

Barchan dunes emerge as a collective phenomena involving the generation of thousands of them in so called barchan dune fields. By measuring the size and position of dunes in Moroccan barchan dune fields, we find that these dunes tend to…

Barchan dunes are found where sand availability is low and wind direction quite constant. The two dimensional shear stress of the wind field and the sand movement by saltation and avalanches over a barchan dune are simulated. The resulting…

The spatio-temporal evolution of a downsized model for a desert dune is observed experimentally in a narrow water flow channel. A particle tracking method reveals that the migration speed of the model dune is one order of magnitude smaller…

In this paper we build models for short-term, mean-term and long-term dynamics of dune in desert. They are models that are degenerated parabolic equations which are, moreover, singularly perturbed. We, then give existence and uniqueness…

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…

Dunes are bedforms found on sandy terrains shaped by fluid flow on Earth, Mars, and other celestial bodies. Despite their prevalence, understanding dune dynamics at the grain scale is challenging due to the vast number of grains involved.…

Emergence and growth of sand dunes results from the dynamic interaction between topography, wind flow and sediment transport. While feedbacks between these variables are well studied at the scale of a single and relatively small dune, the…

Vortex ripples in sand are studied experimentally in a one-dimensional setup with periodic boundary conditions. The nonlinear evolution, far from the onset of instability, is analyzed in the framework of a simple model developed for…

Breaching of earthen or sandy dams/dunes by overtopping flow and waves is a complicated process with strong, unsteady flow, high sediment transport, and rapid bed changes in which the interactions between flow and morphology should not be…

In a recent experimental breakthrough, Hersen et al. [1] demonstrated that by changing the agitating medium from air to water, one can obtain, on laboratory scale, dunes that are downsized copies of desert dunes, thereby overcoming a major…

We investigate the bulldozing motion of a granular sandpile driven forwards by a vertical plate. The problem is set up in the laboratory by emplacing the pile on a table rotating underneath a stationary plate; the continual circulation of…