Technology 2023

The Development Of The Snow Cannon

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The Development Of The Snow Cannon
The Development Of The Snow Cannon

Video: The Development Of The Snow Cannon

Video: The Development Of The Snow Cannon
Video: TechnoAlpin Research & Development - TR8 2023, May
Anonim

Due to global warming, it has been a long time since there have been snowy winters, so ski resorts in lower areas in particular have problems attracting enough tourists. Snow cannons can help, for example, which transform the green slopes into a white ski landscape. This makes little ecological sense , but winter tourism in the Alps alone brings in 13.3 billion euros in sales, which justifies the effort for the operators.

Artificial snow discovered by accident

The basic principle of artificial snow was discovered by chance in Canada in the late 1940s. A team of researchers actually wanted to investigate the icing of jet engines by spraying water in a wind tunnel at low temperatures. There was snow. The first compressed air snow cannon was developed in 1950 and patent applied for in 1954.

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Although there have been various processes for producing technical snow since the first snow cannons, the basic principle is similar to the natural formation of snow: in a cold air stream, so-called snow cores are formed , which form the center of the later snow crystal. Depending on the principle, this works at temperatures around freezing or by adding liquid nitrogen even at summer temperatures .

30 times denser than real snow

Technical snow differs significantly from natural snow. The density is up to 30 times higher and the ice crystals are only a third as large .

The approximately 19,000 snow cannons in Austria (as of 2013) use around six million liters of water and 260,000 MWh of electricity per hectare per hectare. Extrapolated, Europe's snow cannons consume as much energy as Heidelberg and as much water as Hamburg each year.

Fascinating numbers of the construction

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