Experimental study of particle impact on cohesive granular packing.

We investigate experimentally the impact process of sand particles onto a cohesive granular packing made of similar particles. We use a sand-oil mixture with varying liquid content to tune the cohesive strength of the packing. The outcome of the impact is analyzed in terms of the production of ejected particles from the packing. We quantify this production as a function of the impact velocity of the particles for increasing cohesion strength. We identified three different regimes depending on the cohesion number Co, defined as the ratio of the interparticle cohesive force to the particle weight. For small cohesion (i.e., Co⪅1), the ejection process is not modified by the cohesion. For intermediate cohesion (i.e., 1⪅Co⪅20), the ejection process becomes less efficient: the number of ejected particles per impact for a given impact velocity is decreased but the critical impact velocity to trigger the ejection process remains unchanged. Finally, for strong cohesion (i.e., Co⪆20), we observed a progressive increase of the critical impact velocity. These experimental results confirm spectacularly the outcomes of recent numerical simulations on the collision process of a particle onto a cohesive packing and open avenues to model the aeolian transport of moist sand.

Transition from Saltation to Collisional Regime in Windblown Sand.

We report experiments on windblown sand that highlight a transition from saltation to collisional regime above a critical dimensionless mass flux or Shields number. The transition is first seen through the mass flow rate Q, which deviates from a linear trend with the Shields number and seems to follow a quadratic law. Other physical evidences confirm the change of the transport properties. In particular, the particle velocity and the height of the transport layer increases with increasing Shields number in the collisional regime while the latter are invariant with the wind strength in the saltation regime. Discrete numerical simulations support the experimental findings and ascertain that mid-air collisions are responsible for the change of transport regime.