Shape evolution of numerically obtained subaqueous barchan dunes

TL;DR

This study uses CFD-DEM simulations to model the shape evolution of subaqueous barchan dunes, successfully reproducing experimental results and providing new insights into grain forces and fluxes during dune formation.

Contribution

The paper introduces a coupled CFD-DEM approach to simulate the entire growth process of subaqueous barchan dunes, capturing detailed grain-scale dynamics and validating against experimental data.

Findings

Simulated dune evolution matches experimental observations in shape and scale.

Provided new measurements of local granular flux and forces on grains.

Demonstrated the effectiveness of CFD-DEM for studying bedform dynamics.

Abstract

In the realm of granular bedforms, barchan dunes are strong attractors that can be found in rivers, terrestrial deserts and other planetary environments. These bedforms are characterized by a crescentic shape, which, although robust, presents different scales according to the environment they are in, their length scale varying from the decimeter under water to the kilometer on Mars. In addition to the scales of bedforms, the transport of grains presents significant differences according to the nature of the entraining fluid, so that the growth of barchans rests to be fully understood. Given the smaller length and time scales of the aquatic case, subaqueous barchans are the ideal object to study the growth of barchan dunes. In the present paper, we reproduce numerically the experiments of Alvarez and Franklin [Phys. Rev. E 96, 062906 (2017) and Phys. Rev. Lett. 121, 164503 (2018)] on the shape evolution of barchans from their initiation until they have reached a stable shape. We computed the bed evolution by using computational fluid dynamics - discrete element method (CFD-DEM), where we coupled DEM with large eddy simulation (LES) for the same initial and boundary conditions of experiments, performed in a closed-conduit channel where initially conical heaps evolved to single barchans under the action of a water flow in turbulent regime. Our simulations captured well the evolution of the initial pile toward a barchan dune in both the bedform and grain scales, with the same characteristic time and lengths observed in experiments. In addition, we obtained the local granular flux and the resultant force acting on each grain, the latter not yet previously measured nor computed. This shows that the present method is appropriate to numerical computations of bedforms, opening new possibilities for accessing data that are not available from current experiments.