Icing on trucks

In wintertime snow and ice gather on top of truck trailers and accumulate in the understructure of a moving vehicle. These ice/snow aggregate stick on the vehicle and are hard to remove. The density of snows varies, it is 50-70 kg/m3 for fresh fall snow, 700-800kg/m3 for wet snow and around 910kg/m3 for ice.

On a basic 12m x 2,55m trailer,10cm of fresh snow increase the weight by 150-210kg and more than 2 tons with 10cm of wet snow. A cover of 5cm of ice will increase the weight by 1,4 tons.

There are different technics of de-icing trucks and vehicles. From scraping the snow from the top of the trailer to avoiding buildup of ice during parking, via boggy de-icing through heating system.

Examples of de-icing methods:

• bottom vehicle de-icing - preventive treatment of rolling stock with the use of a special fluid mixed with water.
• high-performance electric heaters that can remove ice and snow blocks from bogies, brakes, and clutches.
• top vehicle de-icing - removing snow from hard-to-reach truck roof surfaces, roofs of buses and other commercial vehicles using rotative brush