COMPARISON OF THE MODELS OF DIFFERENT TYPES OF SNOW FENCES IN COLD WIND TUNNEL

This paper describes how snow fences are used to reduce the quantity of drifting snow and increase the visibility on the roadway. There are many types of snow fences used throughout the world. In designing these fences, the height, the porosity and the gap between the fence and the ground are the basic parameter. Approximately 1/20 scale models of eleven different types of structural snow fences were prepared. They were tested under the same laboratory conditions at the wind tunnel, which is installed in cold room of the Cryospheric Environmental Simulator (CES) at the Shinjo Branch of the Snow and Ice Studies, the National Research Institute of Earth Science and Disaster Prevention in Japan. The catch efficiency, drift volume, dimensionless drift area, rate of collection, shape of the drift both on the leeward and windward sides of each model are compared.