EPJE Colloquium - Electrification of wind-blown sand

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Published on 11 December 2013

A new Colloquium in EPJE by Xiao-Jing Zheng introduces and reviews the fundamental laws of the electrification of wind-blown sand and their influence, and highlights the challenges in this field.

The electrification of wind-blown sand is a typical complex system characterised by nonlinearity, randomness, multi-field coupling between thermal diffusion, E-fields and sand movements, as well as trans-scale processes with multi-phase media. Owing to the complex mechanism and the influence of the electrification of wind-blown sand [19], a number of issues remain poorly understood. These include: (1) why sand particles get charged during wind-blown sand movements; (2) how many electric charges a sand particle acquires; (3) why the electric polarity of sand particles is related to the particles’ size; (4) what the change law of wind-blown sand E-fields is, and (5) how to predict the intensity and influence of wind-blown sand E-fields.