Weathering sandstorms in engineering design

With human and technological expansion into desert areas, sandstorms have become an engineering challenge that can be overlooked by designers unfamiliar with arid or semi-arid regions. Global warming further exacerbates the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, making disaster resistance a necessary consideration in building design, which must account for the complexity of wind-sand environments.

Current research on wind-sand effects primarily treats both airflow and sand particles as continuous phases. The Eulerian-Lagrangian (E-L) method provides a more accurate representation of wind-sand environments, but the coupling between wind field and particle motion remains elusive in past works.

Employing the E-L method, Hu et al. filled this research gap to reveal the impact of wind-sand interactions on low-rise building surfaces. Their numerical model accounts for wind speed, particle size, and sand concentration in synthetic turbulence scenarios. As a result, they proposed the shape amplification coefficient, which can be used in engineering mathematics to characterize the relationship between particle concentration and particle impact, enabling precise quantification of wind-sand load effects in building design.

“This comprehensive analysis of particle motion mechanisms provides a mechanistic explanation for the collision distribution patterns on building surfaces, offering insights for formulating protective strategies for low-rise buildings in regions prone to wind-sand activity,” said author Qiang Jin.

In their next phase of research, the authors plan on prioritizing field measurements in wind-sand environments, aiming to understand shape coefficient changes specific to different contexts.

“Our objectives include accumulating data on flow field characteristics and particle distribution under extreme wind-sand conditions, providing data support for wind tunnel experiments and numerical simulations under extreme dust environments, and further promoting the integration of wind-sand load considerations into engineering design standards,” said Jin.

Source: “Aeolian sand load effects and distribution patterns of particle collisions on low-rise buildings under severe wind-sand conditions,” by Di Hu, Teng Zhang, Qiang Jin, Hongyuan Jia, Ka-Veng Yuen, and Kan He, Physics of Fluids (2025). The article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0281161 .