Dust in the wind..

Climate change is the immediate crisis affecting our civilization. Dust in the atmosphere could cool/heat the planet depending on it's anthropogenic origin, and has a huge uncertainity in climate models. I built a large-scale parallelizable particle-based numerical model to understand the dusty paths. It is a CFD-DEM based approach developed in LAMMPS.

Publications

  1. Tholen, K., Pähtz, T., Kamath, S., et al., 2023. Anomalous scaling of aeolian sand transport reveals coupling to bed rheology, Physical Review Letters, 130(5), p.058204. [1]  
  2. Kamath, S., et al., 2022. Scaling laws in Aeolian sand transport under low sand availability, Geophysical Research Letters, 49(11). [2]  
  3. Kamath, S. and Parteli, E., 2021. Toward a large-scale particle-based parallel simulator of Aeolian sand transport, including a model for mobile sand availability, European Physical Journal Web of Conferences. [3]  
  4. Kamath, S., et al., 2014. Flow of granular matter in a silo with multiple exit orifices: Jamming to mixing, Physical Review E, 90(6). [4]  

Highlights

Aeolian saltation

Sand grains hop and splash, in a process sustaining the transport carried by wind.

Cohesive interaction - a van der Waals model

The Bond number defined as the ratio of gravity to the cohesive force becomes low with decreasing grain size.

Dust emission mechanisms

Dust is usually emitted as a result of sand bombardment & agglomerate disintegration.

Mixing behavior in a granular silo

In a multi-orifice setup like this, the random events of jamming/unjamming lead to enhanced mixing.

With my poster in the Geoscience (GSGS) conference, 2020 held at the University of Cologne.

Presenting a technical paper at the virtual Powder & Grains conference, 2021

'Toward a large-scale particle-based parallel simulator of Aeolian sand transport, including a model for mobile sand availability'. Video opens in a new-tab