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joemiyesterday at 11:06 PM2 repliesview on HN

How much does that matter for party balloons, though? It's still buoyant.


Replies

nerdsnipertoday at 5:51 AM

I feel like people really need to learn basic physics.

The gas inside a standard party balloon is generally compressed 3% to inflate the balloon. This wipes out even the theoretical buoyancy of nitrogen. And trust me, there was never any practical buoyancy to begin with. You’d need a ridiculously large balloon in a room with impossibly still air and impossibly null thermal gradients to even measure the buoyancy of nitrogen vs air. The buoyancy of nitrogen vs air would never be perceptible to human senses in any real-world setting.

It would be the same as just filling the balloon with air.

chrismorgantoday at 6:05 AM

A spherical balloon 20cm in radius is displacing 41g of air. Even ignoring compression (which I don’t know enough to quantify the effects of, except that it will make the numbers more unfavourable), nitrogen’s 3.3%-lighter gives you a budget of only 1.35g for the balloon. I believe balloons hare heavier than this, so the balloon will still sink (a little more slowly than an air-filled one, but I’m not sure how noticeable the difference will be).