For the investigation of microstructural and mechanical properties of snow unconfined compression experiments and 3D computed tomography (CT) imaging were performed on sintered rounded grain snow and spherical model snow. The spherical model snow was generated to create geometrically simplified, well-defined microstructures for calibration of numerical models, such as discrete element models (DEM) in which the microstructure is represented by spherical particles.
In the experiments, microstructural variation was created by varying the sintering time (contact size) and the density of the ice sphere samples (number of contacts). The 3D CT images allow for a complete reconstruction of the entire experimental sample (cylindrical sample dimension: diameter = 33.6 mm; height = 14 mm).