Like, say you had a grain silo or some theoretical structure that would allow you to fill the structure as high as you wanted, full of balloons, all inflated with regular air, not helium.
Is there a point where the balloons’ collective miniscule weight would be enough to pop the balloons on the bottom? Or would they just bounce/float on top of each other forever and ever?
I think this gets a bit more complicated. A balloon pops due to the rubber reaching its elastic limit as the internal pressure pushes outward against a lower pressure environment
But in a confined space like a silo, the internal pressures will all be pushing into, and pushed by, eachother. Each balloon only has so much room to expand into, if theyre fairly elastic balloons they can fill that space without surpassing the rubbers elastic limit. It would be a pretty good example of voronoi noise actually.
So, instead of imagining the weight one balloon can support before popping, imagine how much weight a thin section of balloon rubber can handle before rupturing, like under a hydraulic press.
Thanks for putting this into words that make sense. I was trying to describe it as a packing problem and not quite making it to fully sensical.
Great answer! I’m just commenting because I think this would be a question that would be nice to post on c/askscience where I regularly lurk and look for cool questions to answer, but where there aren’t too many questions being asked yet :)
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn’t work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !askscience@lemmy.world
I went there but only one post showed up. Couldn’t find a similar active one on lemmyworld. Is it a different server?
I’m wondering if the balloons at the bottom would all end up as cubes or something and not be able to pop as every surface would be supported and therefore unable to stretch and break. Think of the straight borders that form when bubbles bunch together
Look up voronoi noise, its exactly this scenario, circles or spheres in random assortment expanding to form straight edges against eachother. Its a pattern that often shows up in nature for that reason.
Yes, this is the sort of thing I’m thinking. Would then the balloons be unable to pop since they’d be perfectly supported? I feel the pressure in adjacent balloons would equalise so no one balloon could grow enough to break.
Hard to say. With weights being distributed randomly i dont know if it would naturally equalize like that, or if there might be random pockets of increased or decreased pressure, or something might slip. Variables like weak spots in the rubber, friction and static. Needs testing
This is a question for Randall Munroe. I wish I knew how to summon him.
With scones maybe?
Yeah I read this and instantly thought of the What If books.
Given: a balloon will pop when pressed with enough weight Given: a balloon filled with air has a positive weight
Stack enough balloons on top of a balloon, it’ll pop.
Though…. Given the added complexity of our atmosphere not being homogenous, you might have balloons popping from expansion from going too high before you get them being crushed below.
Stacks of particulate stuff like sand and grain tend to act a like a fluid when stacked or piled in containers like a silo. You don’t feel the pressure in the deep bottom of a pool only from the top, you feel it from every direction as pressure. The mass of grain in a silo pushes against the sides almost as much as down. Think about what would happen to the grain if the silo were magically removed in an instant. It would spread out into a larger diameter pile. This is how we can store things in a silo without absolutely crushing the stuff at the bottom into dust. The science and math behind why it happens is complicated and beyond my ability to better explain this early in the morning, but I’d guess that balloons in a silo would behave similarly. The pressure on the ballons experiencing the most forces would be coming from all sides, like the pressure differential you feel when diving in deep water. That pressure would tend to decrease the volume of the ballons, possibly making them less likely to pop. At a certain point you’d just have big celled foam made of latex rubber and you’d be crushing that.
This is my thought as well. In the end it would be similar to bringing a balloon deep under water, the pressure from all sides would just compress the air inside the to match the pressure outside the balloon. Unless if the rubber had some bad imperfections that were to break under pressure, the balloon should survive.
What’s the weight of one balloon?
What’s the amount of force/pressure needed to pop a balloon?
I’m just going to throw a random thought into the mess. The balloons would be moving. Essentially, they would be vibrating from all the micro bumps. I think either the electrostatic energy or the heat generated by friction would pop balloons more readily than the weight itself.
Source: mostly guessing.
I don’t see them popping beyond the potential friction of rubber on rubber.
The main issue seems to be you have a compressible fluid undergoing compression due to the weight of the rubber in the balloons. As you went down, the balloons would likely look less deflated until they looked not inflated at all. At that point, you might start to get the rubber from the balloons bonding together. As the mass shrinks, you are probably going to get a friction force of the rubber against the silo wall causing shear within the system. This is what will likely cause individual balloons to pop, but at this point the whole mass will be pushed together to a point to not let air escape.
Is this question assuming air pressure and gravity loss at higher altitudes, or is it assuming that the full structure would have a consistent air pressure and gravity? If so, would it be from sea level?
A standard party balloon is around 3 grams if I had to guesstimate, so you could probably figure out how much weight it would take to burst a single balloon, and divide that by 3 grams to get the number of balloons. The main problem with that is the varying amounts that buoyancy and gravity would provide the upward or downward forces.
I think the answer is yes, but I’m not a skilled enough mathematician to give you a great answer… The little bit of information I found online says that a standard size party balloon weighs about 0.14oz, and takes a little more than a pound of pressure to pop a very full balloon, so presumably it would take at the very least the weight of 114 balloons all pressing down on one balloon to come close to popping it. So if you had a very tall and very narrow enclosure where there are only a few balloons on the bottom layer then they would probably pop under the weight of just a few thousand balloons.
So the short answer is yes, but for a definitive answer you would need to know how fully each balloon is inflated, the thickness of the balloons, how many are on the bottom layer, what the ambient air pressure in the room is, the temperature, are you above or below sea level etc.
Once you had all that information you would then need to give it to someone better at math than I am to figure out lol
Have you ever handled a balloon before? They can take way more than a pound of pressure…that’s like barely squeezing it.
Fair enough, but I still think it’s possible that it would take only 1-2 thousand balloons for them to start popping as long as there aren’t too many on the bottom layer
What about static electricity?
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A balloon does not pop at 14 grams of pressure. My toddler of 14 kilo grams can stand on one without popping it.
14 g seems way too low. Have you ever tried popping a balloon without a pointy object?
Except maybe if you had a device that can fill and knot a balloon right at the edge of bursting.
Party balloons won’t burst with just 14 grams. Judging from the party games involving popping balloons by sitting or bumping body parts together, they seem to support a couple kilograms rather than a few grams.
Edit: asked several AIs about this, they all confidently said “14 grams”. It seems they’re mixing how much weight a balloon can lift with how much weight it can stand before popping.
I miss mythbusters
Each balloon adds about 3.5 grams of pressure to the balloons below it (at least according to this experiment), so it’s safe to assume the balloons at the bottom would eventually have enough weight on top for them to pop. I couldn’t find any reliable info on how much pressure it takes for a balloon to pop though.
It’s not much different from popping a balloon with your feet - you increase the pressure until the balloon pops. Same thing is happening here, just with more balloons instead of… feet…? I phrased that poorly, but you get the idea.
Depends on the structure. As you said, a grain silo is a cylinder. A grain silo is certainly not tall enough to support it (based on my loose guesstimation).
What you’re really describing is the various ratios between gravity, buoyancy, and tension required to “pop” a balloon. In the simplest model, you could put each balloon directly on top of the other. Imagine a cylinder which is the perfect width of the balloons. Also imagine, in this special world, that we have an infinitely tall cylinder which is impacted by Earth’s gravity regardless of distance. The only thing in the universe is balloons, the cylinder, and Earth. Assuming the cylinder has no mass, the only thing that holds us back is the weight of the balloons. If the “popping” height of balloons is greater than the gravity of earth by some ratio of the weight of each balloon, the air, and the distance from the earth , then it fails to pop. But if it’s lower than that, then we can theoretically pop it using the weight of the balloons above it.
I’m just going to guess that - yes - you can pop balloons filled with regular air.
Damn that’s a good question.
Depends on the stretchiness of the material. Even without a confined space, but in a theoretical magically fixed balloon tower, I’m going to say that they’d bounce forever. The reasoning being that at some point the bottom balloon would be fully stretched but since it can push against the second balloon, which is not yet fully stretched, it can make that stretch, so it wouldn’t necessarily burst. Continuing this feedback effect upwards it would mean the average balloon only needs to hold its own weight.
