I am playing a game recently called “Metal Gear Solid”. In this game, you can knock down enemies and use balloon to extract them. That balloon can also lift trucks and containers. Of course the features in the game aren’t real, but how powerful are balloons? How big or how many balloons are needed in order to lift a person or even a truck.
Different types of balloons has different capacity. The most common balloons we see is helium balloon. Air weight 1 gram per liter, while helium weight 0.1785 per liter. Helium is much lighter than air so it float in the air (Learn more). A normal balloon has a diameter of 1 foot, that is not a very big balloon and it only lift up to 14 grams. Such as 4 sugar packets. If you want to lift your lunch that weight a pound, you will need a 3 foot diameter balloon. This is a chart given by MAKING SCIENCE FUN! show the capacity of helium balloon
Balloon Volume Lifting Power
Diameter (ft) Cubic Ft Pounds
1 0.52 0.03
2 4.19 0.27
3 14.13 0.91
4 33.51 2.15
5 65.45 4.19
6 113.10 7.25
7 179.61 11.51
8 268.10 17.18
9 381.73 24.46
10 523.63 33.55
11 696.95 44.65
12 904.83 57.97
13 1150.42 73.71
14 1436.84 92.06
15 1767.25 113.23
16 2144.79 137.42
17 2572.60 164.83
18 3053.82 195.66
An average person weight about 136 pounds in the world, you will need a 16 foot diameter balloon. You don’t see a 16 foot diameter helium everyday, you may never saw it. If we try to use 1 diameter balloons to lift that person, we will need about 4500 balloons (Learn more). A normal balloon cost 8 cent, it costs you about 350 dollars to fly with balloons, and be sure to buy insurance before your trip.
Assume that we have a truck that want to fly, we need to find a balloon that suit it. The truck weight 15000 pounds, and we only want to use one balloon. base on HowStuffWork, the equation of balloon capacity is 4/3 x pi x r x r x r. so we need a 77 foot diameter balloon to lift a normal truck. Although a small balloon seems weak, but when it get larger and larger, balloons can be really powerful!
I agree! This really makes me think of Up and how it was able to carry the house around. It’s a really amazing idea but could you actually imagine if that were possible? Check this out! <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/2009/06/how_many_balloons_would_it_take_to_lift_a_house.html"Balloons How many people do you think would actually be willing to attempt something like this? As cool as it is, it’s also a very risky idea. I know I would be way to frightened to ever attempt such an act but sure it cool to imagine!
This is really so cool. You used the idea from a video game and brought the science into the the real world. Also, I love that chart you used. The fact you were able to find this tells me you did some research for this post. It also reminds me a lot of Up. Either way this post goes over a really cool question in a really cool way.