An Experimental Study on Splash Functions of Natural Sand-Bed Collision

The interaction between sand particles and sand bed is a key part for the study of wind-blown sand. The splash functions obtained from experimental observations are of great significance to help us understand relevant physical processes. Due to the adoption of substitute material in experiment and immoderate assumptions in numerical simulation, the results of previous studies are still debatable. This paper experimentally studies on splash functions of natural eolian sand particles by using a self-developed particle emission system to simulate the splash process. Based on the high-speed photography technique, the distribution of the angle, speed, and number of the liftoff particles and its quantitative characterization are obtained. The mathematical expectations of relevant variables from this work are comparable with existing results but are quantitatively different from the measured data of substitute particles or the numerical simulated results. More importantly, the detailed statistical characteristics of the natural eolian sand splash function are also extracted from our experimental data, which are really significant for elaborative wind-blown sand study in the future.