Design of next generation snow gun fans

Most of the skiing resorts normally use snow guns to ensure a suitable amount of artificial snow on ski tracks. The main component of a snow gun are a fan used to move the air and an atomizer to inject droplets of water in the main flow. Issues with these devices are (i) power requirements, between 10 and 30 kW for a single device (a complete track needing up to 100 snow guns) and (ii) acoustic emissions, typically above 80 dB due to the rotational speed comprised between 1500 and 3600 rpm. The paper describes the development of a family of next-generation snow gun to cover a wide range of applications. The design process is based on a methodology that combines Eulerian analysis, RANS computations and experiments.