Solid barriers for windblown sand mitigation: Aerodynamic behavior and conceptual design guidelines

Protection from windblown-sand is one of the key engineering issues for construction and maintenance of human infrastructures in arid environments. In the last century, several barriers with different shapes have been proposed in order to overcome this problem, but literature lacks of a systematic performance quantitative analysis, and the key geometric parameters that promote sedimentation have not been yet recognized. A deep understanding of the aerodynamics effects of sand barrier on the flow is an unavoidable step to achieve these objectives. The present computational study aims to comparatively analyze different kinds of windblown sand mitigation solid barriers, clarify their working principles, extract from the aerodynamics analysis key geometrical features of the barriers and relate them to the sand trapping performances. Approximated metrics for performance assessment are introduced using aerodynamic parameters. The performances of an innovative solid barrier and the ones of commonly used solid barriers are compared in terms of these metrics. The effects of incoming wind velocity profiles on sand trapping performances are evaluated as well. An empirical dimensionless performance estimator is proposed and used to provide general design guidelines.