Russian Officials Visit Pitztal To See All Weather Snowmaking

Senior members of the Russian Olympic Organising Committee were in Austria last month to witness a demonstration of the IDE all weather snow-making system.

The Russians are looking at ways to prevent any danger of a repeat of the issues faced by Cypress Mountain in British Columbia last winter when the ski area struggled to provide enough snow to build terrain features for freestyle event during an unusually warm spell of weather when conventional snowmaking equipment could not operate.

The IDE system is capable of creating large volumes of snow at positive temperatures and has been installed on the glaciers of Zermatt in Switzerland and Pitztal in Austria – the highest ski areas in their respective countries – primarily to ensure snow cover in the autumn when natural snowfall is not guaranteed but both areas want to guarantee they can open.

The Russian delegation which included the president of the Russian Ski Federation, senior members of the country's Olympic Organising Committee and members of the international ski federation (FIS) as well as delegates from the Russian Freestyle ski, Cross country ski and Biathlon federations and senior staff from the key Rusian si resorts where the olympucs will actually be staged near Sochi.

With temperatures peaking at +25C IDE and Pitztal created a 200m long area of snow for testing at Pitztal, which is currently closed to the general public until its long season begins in September. Several pro racers gave the snow, which was 20 metres wide and 60cm (two feet) deep a try.

Courtesy of and © Snow24 plc

It would be interesting to know if the snow would have taken a piste machine, but I can understand for the test conditions that was not practicable. The IDE system is an exciting prospect.
Many people do not realise that a lot of areas in the Alps would not have the skiing that they enjoy, were it not for artificial snow.
It was unfortunate that the Canadians did seem to have miscaculated, but the Russian group may well assist in bringing forward a skiing technical revolution.

Can anyone tell me the science behind creating snow at 25degC without the use of beefy chemicals?

Curious.

tino_11 wrote:Can anyone tell me the science behind creating snow at 25degC without the use of beefy chemicals?

Curious.

No, but the company have techy stuff on their website...

http://www.ide-snowmaker.com/

The technology is simple, in that it operates in the same way as a fridge. No chemicals are involved in the process, so in that respect it is environmentall friendly.
However, there are some drawbacks. Power consumption at 187 kwh per ton of snow, will, in warmer times, need to be increased in order to pump the chill water.
Then the plant is large and heavy, so the snow will have to be distributed.

 
The system needs cooled water to run the condenser and keep the deep vacuum which provides the cooling for the feed water at any temperature.

 

With feed water @ 4.5°C the unit has a capacity of 480ton/day, which I can work out is 24 hours from the power usage stats on the website.  For each 1deg increase in feed water temperature the efficiency of the unit is decreased by 1.5%, so providing feed water at say 25°C means that cumulatively you are down to 355ton/day, using the same power as required for 480ton/day at 4.5°C (74% efficiency).

 

Given that 480ton/day is equal to 800m3 of snow, then at 25°C you will get 592m3 of snow.  This will use 12.6kW per ton of snow which gives coverage of 1.67m3 of snow. 

 

Given that you need a 2400m3 of snow to create the strip described in the article (200m long, 20m wide, 0.6m deep), this would use 18108kW of power, taking 6.8 days and costing 2445 GBP assuming 10p per unit.

 

Now that is all well and good, but only considers the cost turning the feed water into snow.  According to the technical specs.  This requires a water feed supply rate of 20m3/hour, which is quite feasible if you have a nice reservoir on hand.  However as mentioned at the top, the system needs cooled water to maintain the vacuum and condense the feed water to create snow.  The required flow rate of this cooling water is a whopping 480m3 an hour, which cannot be supplied by your 25°C reservoir, and therefore must be cooled first.  Taking the disclaimer from the companies own website….

 

The above power consumption refers to the VIM unit only and does not include the supporting cooling system, (Chiller, Cooling Tower and Cooling Tower circulation pump)

 

……I can assume this is a closed system, however is going to require a hell of a lot of power to cool the water which will ultimately be used to,..wait for it,….cool water.

 

This further increases the cost, and may go some distance to explaining why Snowdomes are so bleeding expensive.  The flip side of all this, if you believe in it is, that this frivolous energy consumption (similar to air-conditioning a baseball stadium for 6 to 8 hours as I witnessed in Arizona), warms the environment and potentially causes……yep, you got it,…..a lack of snow.

 

 

 

 

Disclaimer:  I am not entirely 100% sure about my cost calculation above, but it's safe to say it's bloody expensive. Suitable maybe for extreme cases, but we are not gonna be sliding down the highstreet in July anytime soon.

I'm not so certain about the "no chemicals" bit. Visit before last, I was up at Trockener Steg and there was a large pallet load of full sacks marked as going across to IDE. I've no idea what was in the sacks, it looked like salt.

From what I can see the physical process of making the snow is chemical free, however I assume there are chemicals used in the water cooling system which is supplemental.

These are ferociously power hungry bits of kit, and not practical for keeping pistes open. However they may have some application in shaping parks etc for competition when snow is sparce. According the companies own literature there are only 2 of them (smaller of the two models) in the world, Zermatt and Pitztal. They are bloody huge things.