Abstract
Three dimensional dunes of crescentic shape, called barchans, are
commonly found on Earth and other planetary environments. In the great
majority of cases, barchans are organized in large fields in which
corridors of size-selected barchans are observed, and where
barchan-barchan interactions play an important role in size regulation.
Previous studies shed light on the interactions between barchans by
making use of monodisperse particles, but dunes in nature consist,
however, of polydisperse grains. In this paper, we investigate the
binary interactions of barchans consisting of (i) bidisperse mixtures of
grains and (ii) different monodisperse grains (one type for each
barchan). We performed experiments in a water channel where grains of
different sizes were poured inside forming two barchans that interacted
with each other while filmed by a camera, and we obtained their
morphology from image processing. We observed that a transient stripe
appears over the dunes in cases of bidisperse mixtures, that interaction
patterns vary with concentrations, and that different interactions exist
when each barchan consists of different monodisperse grains.
Interestingly, we found the conditions for a collision in which the
upstream barchan is larger than the downstream one, and we propose a
timescale for the interactions of both monodisperse and bidisperse
barchans. Our results represent a new step toward understanding complex
barchanoid structures found on Earth, Mars and other celestial bodies.