Calibration of simulation parameters for wind erosion gas-solid two-phase flow in arid and semiarid soils

Abstract

ABSTRACT To construct a coupled simulation model of soil wind erosion and two-phase flow in arid and semiarid regions, the proper contact parameters of the soil discrete element simulation model are obtained based on the angle of repose (AoR) calibration test. The coupled simulation model is established by combining computational fluid dynamics. The response value of the wind speed of sand initiation is used to verify the model’s accuracy. Due to the characteristics of arid and semiarid soils, this paper uses the Hertz-Mindlin with JKR contact model in EDEM software to calibrate the soil parameters based on soil physical tests and designs the Plackett-Burman, steepest climb, and Box-Behnken tests according to Design-Expert software to obtain the soil AoR second-order regression. With the AoR of 33.52° as the target, the best combination of parameters is obtained: soil-soil collision recovery of 0.64, soil-steel static friction coefficient of 0.31, JKR surface energy of 3.302 J m-2. Finally, by using calibrated parameters and the threshold wind velocity as the response value, the wind-sand air-solid two-phase flow test is conducted in ANSYS Fluent and EDEM, with the relative error between the starting wind speed recorded by the high-speed camera in the wind tunnel test and the threshold wind velocity shown in the simulation model calculated to be 8.7%, and the calibrated soil parameters met the requirements of the coupled simulation.