Birth of a subaqueous barchan dune

Barchan dunes are crescentic shape dunes with horns pointing downstream. The present paper reports the formation of subaqueous barchan dunes from initially conical heaps in a rectangular channel. Because the most unique feature of a barchan dune is its horns, we associate the time scale for the appearance of horns to the formation of a barchan dune. A granular heap initially conical was placed on the bottom wall of a closed conduit and it was entrained by a water flow in turbulent regime. After a certain time, horns appear and grow, until an equilibrium length is reached. Our results show the existence of the time scales 0.5 t_c and 2.5 t_c for the appearance and equilibrium of horns, respectively, where t_c is a characteristic time that scales with the grains diameter, gravity acceleration, densities of the fluid and grains, and shear and threshold velocities.