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 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.
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.
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.
Why would it not?
