Dynamic Simulation of Snow for Development of High-efficient Snowblower

Abstract

In Japan, about half of country is occupied by heavy snowfall area. Snowblowers are essential for people who live in such area. For the efficient development of a snowblower, stable and quantitative performance evaluation method is required. Presently, performance of a snowblower is mostly investigated by manipulation with an actual machine in heavy snowfall area. However, the snow removal work using an actual machine can evaluate only qualitative performance and it is required to confirm the performance in several regions because snow properties fluctuate according to a change of climate or region. Therefore, we tried to reproduce the snow removal work using the Discrete Element Method (DEM) in this study. DEM is widely used as an effective method in granular flow, powder mechanics, rock mechanics and simple snow behavior in a snowblower. In addition to the conventional DEM, we developed potential model for reproducing the compaction of snow and air drag model in order to consider the properties of actual snow. Moreover, we constrained the degrees of the freedom of snow elements to reproduce the initial shape of fallen snow in the simulation. As a result of this computational method, it was clarified that the detailed snow behavior in relation to the snowblower can be successfully reproduced by simulation using the DEM. The calculation results were compared with the experimental results, both results exhibited reasonable agreements. Therefore, we have succeeded in the computational reproduction of snow behavior in a snowblower using the DEM with new snow property model.