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?
Yes.
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.
What’s the weight of one balloon?
What’s the amount of force/pressure needed to pop a balloon?
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.
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.
