The importance of snow microstructure: An analysis of snow compressive strength under high strain

Abstract

Understanding the mechanical behavior of snow is critical for many cold regions applications, such as vehicle mobility or avalanche forecasting. Previous studies have used experimental tests and model simulations to look at the impact of snow microstructure on the overall mechanical strength. However, these analyses have not explicitly defined these relationships and few have focused on the brittle regime. We compare the peak stresses of experimental and simulated dry sintered snow samples compressed at a high strain rate to a variety of microstructural parameters and use a linear regression framework to explicitly characterize the relationships between them. We show that the most influential microstructural parameter for characterizing snow strength is the scaled bond contact area between neighboring snow grains, while the least important is the average sintered bond size. We then demonstrate that the influence of sintering time on peak stress varies drastically depending on the grain size of the snow sample, with larger impact found on smaller grain size samples.