Production of Artificial Snow at Varying Temperature Conditions and Comparison of its Microstructure with Natural Snow

Abstract

This research work presents the investigation of the effects of temperature on the production rate of snow. For the production of snow, a wooden prototype of snow making machine was built having three main units named as water basin, nucleation chamber and moisture trap. After fabrication, the machine was kept inside the cold laboratory, where a low temperature surrounding environment was provided. This machine is based on the common supersaturation principle of blowing cold unsaturated air over a heated water basin that increases the temperature and moisture content of air. The moist air stream is directed into the nucleation chamber, where it gets cooled and the process of nucleation of ice crystals is started on the stretched nylon wire. During the experiments, the temperature of the cold laboratory was varied from -20℃ to -35℃, whereas the temperature of the water basin was maintained at 25℃. The snow crystals formed inside the nucleation chamber were mainly dendritic in nature. The temperature variation and the production rate of snow was measured at all laboratory temperatures ranges from (-20℃ to -35℃) with 5℃ temperature decrement. The average values of snow production rate inside the nucleation chamber at all the give values of laboratory temperatures were found to be 72 g/h, 108.76 g/h, 142.64 g/h and 178.53 g/h. After measuring the temperature variation and production rate, microtoming of the Artificial snow sample and natural snow sample was done by the use of microcomputer tomography machine (SKYSCAN, 1173) and various morphometric parameters such as structural thickness, structural separation, and total porosity were compared. After performing experiments on the existing design of artificial snow making machine, a new design of the nucleation chamber of snow making machine was proposed in ordered to overcome the limitations of existing design.