A Novel Continuum Approach to Simulating Drifting Snow

A novel viscosity model for drifting snow was developed to meet the CFD modeling requirements of drifting snow using a fully two-way coupled Eulerian-Eulerian formulation. Unlike other Eulerian-Eulerian models, this approach allowed explicit resolution of the saltation layer without resorting to empiricism. Since two more equations are solved compared to other approaches, the computing effort is considerably larger. Moreover, the time steps are much smaller than other approaches since the equations are coupled more closely. The new approach requires high performance computing and its scaling over a typical distributed computing architecture. Recommendations are made for improving the method's scaling.