Development of Snow Treatment Technology for the Viaduct Using Small Quantity of Water


Toshishige FUJII, Ryoji IZUNAMI, Toru ENDO


There are two principal methods of snow melting for railway use. One is watering method using sprinklers. The other is panel-heater method using an indirect exchange of heat energy. However, there are some problems in these methods. For example, the resource of water is limited, so it is difficult to use sprinklers because it consume very much water and energy. In addition, usually the running cost of these methods is high. We propose application of the nozzle for road watering to sprinkle track slab. If this method is applied to the viaduct equipped with snow storage system, it will reduce the water consumption in snow-melting of Joetsu Shinkansen to the extent of 1/3 and save the cost of snow-melting.