Snowmaker Zermatt

To enable winter sports enthusiasts to ski on good slopes even in spring, Zermatt relies on the snowmaker. The snow machine fabricates temperature independently  snow and this even at temperatures above 0°C.

The Snowmaker is a further development of a desalination plant. From the desalination plant, engineers designed a large cooling system used in gold mines. The waste product of this air cooling system - similar to a refrigerator - is an ice-snow mixture. From there, the technical step to the snow production plant was not big for the resourceful engineers.

The Snowmaker was to be integrated into the existing snowmaking system of the Zermatt ski region. Beforehand, however, a detailed process description had to be drawn up with the process engineers at Lonza in Visp. This formed the basis for the development of the visualization and control software. The challenge was to integrate a chemical/physical process into the existing control system of the snowmaking equipment of Zermatt Bergbahnen AG.

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