Modeling of dry snow adhesion during normal impact with surfaces

Abstract

Contamination due to dry snow smoke adhesion is an evident danger for sensor blinding on future autonomous driving cars under winter road conditions. This paper examines at what velocities ice particles and agglomerates, representing dry snow, adhere to surfaces of various materials. Contact models for normal direction, tangential sliding, and tangential rolling that account for the adhesive interaction of spherical particles due to Van der Waals forces are used in the study. Three different scenarios of impacts are presented i) single particle impact, ii) small agglomerate impacts, and iii) large agglomerate impacts. It is shown that by increasing the number of particles in an agglomerate, the velocity at which the agglomerate sticks to the impact wall increases, i.e. the agglomerate is more likely to stick to a surface. It is also shown how material properties influence the tendency of dry road snow to adhere to a surface.