https://doi.org/10.1051/epjconf/202124913004
Toward a large-scale particle-based parallel simulator of Aeolian sand transport, including a model for mobile sand availability
1
Institute of Geophysics and Meteorology, University of Cologne, Germany
2
Faculty of Physics, University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany
* e-mail: skamath@uni-koeln.de
** e-mail: eric.parteli@uni-due.de
Published online: 7 June 2021
We develop a numerical tool for particle-based simulations of Aeolian sand transport. Our model combines a Discrete-Element-Method for the sand particles with an efficient hydrodynamic description of the average turbulent horizontal wind velocity field over the granular bed, which has been developed in previous work and accounts for the two-way coupling of the granular and fluid phases. However, here we implement our model within the open source library LAMMPS for granular massively parallel simulations and incorporate a new grid coarsening scheme for the wind model. We show that our model quantitatively reproduces observed values of the steady-state (saturated) sand flux under various flow conditions. Furthermore, we model different conditions of mobile sand availability and find a strong dependence of the sand flux on this availability.
A video is available at https://doi.org/10.48448/6ba4-4802
© The Authors, published by EDP Sciences, 2021
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
