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can the weight of millions of balloons be heavy enough to pop the balloons at the bottom? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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?

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago (6 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 11 months ago (1 children)

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 :)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

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: [email protected]

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