Biocementation Control of Sand against Wind Erosion
Publication: Journal of Geotechnical and Geoenvironmental Engineering
Volume 146, Issue 6
Abstract
One-third of the global land area suffers from wind erosion, and its prevention is a critical issue in arid regions of the world. During a wind erosion event, the impacts of saltating grains on the surface cause abrasion of crusted soil surfaces. The topic of this study is to examine the efficiency of sand biocementation to diminish the wind erodibility of an aeolian sand. The erosion rate, number of emitted particles, and flux of the eroded mass from surface (as erodibility indicators) of the biocemented crust, formed by Bacillus megaterium, were measured in a wind tunnel at three different wind velocities; moreover, one extra condition with the presence of impacting particles at the lowest wind velocity was tested. According to the results of the tests, the biocemented crust could provide considerable protection for erodible aeolian sand against wind erosion (without impacting particles), diminishing the sand erodibility indicators by two to four orders of magnitude. However, with the impact of saltating particles, the formed crust could reduce erodibility indicators only by one order of magnitude.
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Data Availability Statement
Data used during the study appear in the published article; these data are as follows:
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size distribution; and
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erosion rate.
The rest of the data (directly produced by the tests; i.e., raw data) used during the study are available from the corresponding author by request; these data are as follows:
•
the raw data of the sand particle counter;
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the raw data of the XRD test; and
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the raw data of penetrometer tests.
Acknowledgments
Funding for this research was provided by grants from the National Key Research and Development Program of China (No. 2016YFC0500900) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 11602100 and 11172118) to Ning Huang, and by grants from the Iran National Science Foundation (No. 96012830) to Abbas Soroush. The authors have no conflict of interest to declare and would like to express their gratitude to Dr. Jie Zhang for his comments on wind tunnel experiments. Also, the kind efforts of Ms. Sona Jodari Abbasi and Ms. Yang Yu for providing assistance during testing are appreciated.
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Published In
Journal of Geotechnical and Geoenvironmental Engineering
Volume 146 • Issue 6 • June 2020
Copyright
©2020 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Jul 9, 2019
Accepted: Jan 22, 2020
Published online: Apr 13, 2020
Published in print: Jun 1, 2020
Discussion open until: Sep 13, 2020
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