A two-species model of aeolian saltation incorporating cooperative splash

Most aeolian sand transport models incorporate a so-called “splash function” that describes the number and velocity of particles ejected by the splash of an impacting particle. It is usually obtained from experiments or simulations in which an incident grain is shot onto a static granular packing. However, it has recently been discovered that, during aeolian sand transport, the bed cannot be considered as static, since it cannot completely recover between successive impacts. This leads to a correction of the splash function accounting for cooperative effects, which is responsible for an anomalous third-root scaling of the sand flux with the particle-fluid density ratio s [1]. Here, we present a two-species saltation model that incorporates this correction. In contrast to the model by [1], it does not only quantitatively reproduce sand fluxes but also transport thresholds from measurements and discrete element method-based sand transport simulations across several orders of magnitude of s.

[1] Tholen, Pähtz, Kamath, Parteli, Kroy, Anomalous scaling of aeolian sand transport reveals coupling to bed rheology, Physical Review Letters, accepted.