Numerical and wind tunnel modeling on the windbreak effectiveness to control the aeolian erosion of conical stockpiles

There are many industrial sites where open aggregate conical piles exist to store granular materials, like coal, industrial residuals, or other minerals. Usually these storage piles are placed in open areas, making them susceptible to wind erosion, which can create health, environmental, and/or economical concerns. It is common to minimize the dust emission through the placement of windbreaks in the vicinity of the storage piles, which reduces the wind speed in the vicinity of the pile’s surface. In this work, some experimental results from a wind tunnel study on the erosion of a conical sand pile, exposed or protected by a fence with porosities of 0, 70, and 83%, are shown. For the sheltered cases, the windbreak was placed at several distances from the pile’s leading edge, ranging from H to 4H, where H is the initial height of the non-eroded pile. The evolution of the shape of the sand pile is shown, at different instances in time, and the pile deformation quantified, using a novel experimental setup developed for wind erosion studies. This information might be regarded as a useful dataset for the benchmark of computational models aiming to produce the transient simulation of the aeolian erosion of stockpiles. The CFD results are comprised of the modeling of several experimental scenarios. The computational results for the surface wind velocity show a good correlation with the initial deformation of the pile. Based on the results, the isocontours of (u _s /u _r ) presented might be regarded as a good basis for the estimation of the pile shear velocity.