Life-Cycle Performance and Cost Analysis of Sand Mitigation Measures: Toward a Hybrid Experimental-Computational Approach

Windblown sand action affects civil structures and infrastructures in sandy environments, such as deserts and coasts. The wind interacts with human built structures of any kind leading to harmful effects, endangering their serviceability and users' safety. To counter it, a number of sand mitigation measures (SMM) have been proposed, primarily through the trial-and-error empirical approach. As such, innovative approaches to properly quantify windblown sand action and to design SMM are needed in the current state-of-art and practice. In this study, the authors propose a novel hybrid approach to derive the life-cycle performance of SMM based on the combination of reliable wind-sand tunnel tests and innovative wind-sand computational simulations. Wind-sand tunnel tests are carried out to characterize the incoming sand flux in open field conditions. In a hybrid approach perspective, wind-sand tunnel measurements allow to properly tuned cheaper wind-sand computational simulations of the full-scale SMM performance. A probabilistic approach for determining windblown sand action and frequencies of sand removal maintenance is applied to a case study on a desert railway. Finally, a life-cycle cost analysis is carried out to assess extra-costs and savings derived from the implementation of the SMM. The proposed approach paves the way toward a comprehensive hybrid approach to the performance assessment of SMM.