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.

This is a question for Randall Munroe. I wish I knew how to summon him.

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.

What’s the weight of one balloon?

What’s the amount of force/pressure needed to pop a balloon?

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.

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.

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

Theoretically speaking, eventually, yes. If you have millions, you might even need billions of balloons, stacked on top of each other, the force of gravity on all those millions of balloons should equate to a weight that is high enough to pop the balloons at the bottom.

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.

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.

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.