Experimental Study on the Compressive Properties of Sintered Machine-Made Snow under Medium and Low Strain Rates

Snow is commonly used to make winter sculptures, prepare ski slopes and tracks, build some winter shelters, and so on. In the unconfined uniaxial compression test of the fully sintered machine-made snow, the loading process was divided into four distinct sections. After brief elastic deformation, the specimens continued to compress, and when the strain exceeded 2%, an inflection point in stress values emerged, with rapid increases observed within the 2%–4% strain range. The experiment showed that the loading curve of the recompacted snow samples was roughly the same as that of the in situ sampled snow. In the unconfined uniaxial compression tests conducted at loading rates of 0.5 and 10 mm/min, the results differed significantly. At a slower loading rate, the material deformed slowly without obvious staged failure characteristics.