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