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Journal of Arid Land
Journal of Arid Land  2017, Vol. 9 Issue (2): 270-277    DOI: 10.1007/s40333-017-0005-7     CSTR: 32276.14.s40333-017-0005-7
Research Article     
Evolution of crescent-shaped sand dune under the influence of injected sand flux: scaling law and wind tunnel experiment
Yang ZHANG1, Yuan WANG1,*(), Xiaosi ZHOU1, Bin YANG2
1 Department of Fluid Machinery and Engineering, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an 710049, China
2School of Chemical Engineering, Northwest University, Xi’an 710069, China
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Abstract  

This paper studies the evolution of crescent-shaped dune under the influence of injected flux. A scaling law and a wind tunnel experiment are carried out for comparison. The experiment incorporates a novel image processing algorithm to recover the evolutionary process. The theoretical and experimental results agree well in the middle stage of dune evolution, but deviate from each other in the initial and final stages, suggesting that the crescent-shaped dune evolution is intrinsically scale-variant and that the crescent shape breaks down under unsaturated condition.

Key words： crescent-shaped sand dune      scale-invariant model      wind tunnel experiment      image processing     
Received: 10 June 2016      Published: 20 April 2017
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Cite this article:

Yang ZHANG, Yuan WANG, Xiaosi ZHOU, Bin YANG. Evolution of crescent-shaped sand dune under the influence of injected sand flux: scaling law and wind tunnel experiment. Journal of Arid Land, 2017, 9(2): 270-277.

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http://jal.xjegi.com/10.1007/s40333-017-0005-7     OR     http://jal.xjegi.com/Y2017/V9/I2/270

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