News

01.17.2020

The science behind snowmaking at very cold temperatures!

The science behind snowmaking at very cold temperatures: Are you sure you are making the most of your water resources?

Snow production is based on the physical principle of freezing water. However, during the process, a significant amount of water evaporates, lands unfrozen, or ends up on un-skiable terrain (flocking the trees or landing on the backside of the mountain!). As snow guns expel and atomize the water in to small droplets, the droplets are exposed to the cold ambient air and experience evaporative cooling and sublimation, causing a humidity rise in the surrounding air.
As part of the freezing process, heat must be released from the water to form into a crystalline structure, thus creating a thermal lift coming off the snowguns plume. The colder the temperatures are, the higher the temperature differential will be, and the greater the thermal uplift! What is the consequence of that? Well, the unfrozen and smaller droplets are likely to be moved away, evaporate, or end up in unusable areas of the mountain!
To overcome this, it is important to freeze the droplets as quick as possible while they exit the snowgun nozzles! Bigger frozen droplets will have more mass to overcome the thermal lift, have less surface area than a group of smaller drops, and are more likely to be deposited on the slope! This droplet size preservation exponentially increases the efficiency of snow production and reduces the ski area's water usage.
We like to remind everyone that 100% of the water used for snowmaking all goes back to nature, and most of it will land as snow, but if your customers can’t make turns in it, you can’t count it as skiable inventory!
Snomax nucleators can help by jump-starting the freezing process! Snomax is an all-natural, serialized nucleating protein; In fact, it is the same nucleating protein found in all rain and natural snowfall!
The Snomax proteins found in nature, along with other natural nucleators, have no guarantee of freezing all the droplets because nature does not supply a sufficient quantity to have one high-temperature nucleator in each individual drop formed by the snowguns nozzle. On the other hand, Snomax snow inducer offers a guaranteed number of nature’s highest temperature nucleators in your water, with a wet-bulb freezing temperature of 2.88°C/27.2°F.
Remember, in the end, it's not at which temperature each nucleator forms an ice crystal, but it is Snomax‘s speed of freezing and the decreased distance the droplet travels in wet form that makes for greater snowmaking efficiency. This also reduced costs and saves resources, especially when it’s really cold!