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Vacuum Balloons (2020)
- bell-cot 4y agoVacuum balloons for children’s birthday parties??? I’m seeing serious safety issues. No sign that they are.
- tlb 4y agoDoes that seem insurmountable? Large vacuum chambers are widely deployed in homes today, as thermoses and CRTs. As long as the structure punctures and leaks rather than fracturing suddenly, it doesn’t sound wildly unsafe. Perhaps the toy would consist of bags of inch-diameter vacuum balls, the rupture of any one creating just a pop.
- bell-cot 4y agoBoth to look more like current helium birthday balloons, and for square/cube law reasons, I'm thinking the vacuum birthday balloons would need to be ~30cm diameter. The fragile vacuum part of a thermos has far fewer cc's of vaccuum (vs. a ~30cm "balloon"), is inside a pretty tough shell, and kids usually aren't allowed to play with 'em. CRT's hold more vacuum, but certainly aren't something that kids get to play around with. Vs. have you ever watched younger kids play with balloons? Consider the potential for ear injury, if Kid_1 breaks a 30cm vacuum balloon in close proximity to Kid_2's eardrum. Or how similar the broken pieces of a vacuum balloon might be to broken glass.
- jagged-chisel 4y agoKids play with current balloons because they’re elastic and bouncy. I think they would be bored of a perfect sphere that just hovers around the room. Further, given that the vacuum balloons are rigid, I think it’s far more likely to take on a leak that fills the balloon rather quickly but not instantly. For argument’s sake, suppose one does fail suddenly- do we even know what that sounds like? I don’t think it could possibly be worse than a (thick enough) mylar balloon pumped up to two atmospheres and exploding. It’s not like suddenly there’s vacuum in the room.
- moring 4y agoThis is a suggestion what might happen: https://what-if.xkcd.com/6/ https://what-if.xkcd.com/6/
- madaxe_again 4y agoTo answer the question posed in the article: no. People are going to buy the helium balloon that costs 300x less than the highly engineered device made out of ultralight materials that could implode violently if improperly handled. Party balloons don’t need replacing - they need banning. They use irreplaceable resources frivolously, and cause harm to wildlife and livestock, who almost inevitably end up eating the things.
- phyzome 4y agoEven better, when the helium runs out, they're going to buy hydrogen balloons. Much safer. :-)
- madaxe_again 4y agoHydrogen gets a bad rap. For the quantity that you’d have in a party balloon - even a dozen of them together - it’s safe, particularly as you aren’t going to have a stoichiometric mixture inside a balloon. If you managed to light one, you’d get a small implosion - much less than from a vacuum vessel. They’d also deflate more quickly, and wouldn’t travel anywhere near as far when inevitably released. You could even do instant balloons, which come pre-sealed and just require snapping a vessel within to generate hydrogen.
- BenjiWiebe 4y agoUh... They aren't quite as safe as you're implying. Hydrogen is really easy to light, and if one balloon goes the others in the bunch will 100% ignite too. You still get a pretty good amount of fire per balloon, just not an explosion.
- __MatrixMan__ 4y agoAs a former pyromaniac I can assure you that a party balloon filled with hydrogen (or a "Hindenburg Bomb" as we called them) is a pretty underwhelming thing. It goes up in a whoosh, not a bang , not a billowing ball of flame, and the screw-around factor just isn't there. Like, what to you do with it besides let it go whoosh? The only thing that's dangerous about them is how boring they are. You'll be graduating to more interesting forms of pyromancy (like trying to make a flame thrower out of a punching balloon) in no time.
- mhb 4y agotldr: "But Beaux noted that these small-scale prototypes were not air buoyant. "We've demonstrated that we can build them, we can pull vacuum, but in order to make them flow to air, we just need to make them bigger," he said." So, step two: profit.
- mjhay 4y agoSounds like they built a novel kind of vacuum chamber. A larger balloon would have larger compressive stress over its entire surface. I'm very skeptical that could ever be made to float.
- raydiatian 4y agoWe fail to give up the most irrelevant things at the greatest cost.
- bilsbie 4y agoMedicine, law, business, engineering, these are all noble pursuits, and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, (and party balloons) these are what we stay alive for. - dead poets society
- Robotbeat 4y agoThis is pretty silly, they didn’t even show a picture of the prototypes (which don’t work) in the news article.
- ajuc 4y agoThey would just look like spheres?
- Robotbeat 4y agoNot likely if they’re vacuum.
- dreamcompiler 4y agoYes likely if they're rigid, which is the whole point of vacuum balloons. The trick is coming up with a material that is strong enough to withstand the atmospheric overpressure trying to crush it, while also being sufficiently lightweight.
- rnitchy 4y agocarbon nanotubes, the answer is always carbon nanotubes ;)
- marcosdumay 4y agoLike some foamy spheres. I couldn't understand if foamy spheres with a plastic film around them or just foamy spheres with self-contained holes. Oh, and on the color of aerogels.
- rnitchy 4y agohow about this. lets assume a sphere or egg shape is strongest and hardest to crush. create a bunch of ultralight tubes that are 12-18 inched long and crescent shaped. they are grouped in sets of 6 or more and are all connected at top and bottom by a small plastic ring. you slide them into a party balloon. and then give it air pressure, allowing you to spread them out with 60 degrees in between each crescent like an orange with all the slices. then you slowly let out the pressure so the rubber conforms against the 6 curves an makes a sphere at atmospheric pressure. then you pull vacuum, or simply place a bunch in a vacuum chamber and tie them off or glue the opening using something that wont react with latex
- rexreed 4y agoA picture is worth a thousand words. This would be the literal case for this article. Perhaps 2,000 words.
- dreamcompiler 4y agoNeal Stephenson imagined these in The Diamond Age: After we developed the technology to grow pure diamond in any shape, we used it to create ultra-thin rigid shells for giant airships, pulled a slight vacuum inside, and they floated. The book is about much more than that though.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- dcminter 4y agoOne also crops up in Banks' "Feersum Endjinn" which I think pre-dates it by a couple of years?
- h2odragon 4y agoSee also Fred Saberhagen's "Empire of the East," which pre-dates Banks. His characters are non-tech but have a "Djinn of Technology" who can conjure things for them, but they haven't the understanding to ask for the right things or use them, at first. He has fun with it. Once they get a balloon in the air they ask for a rudder to steer it; and get the wrong kind.
- pixl97 4y agoDjinn of technology, I expect we'll see that next when someone hooks a LLM to a 3d printer.
- messe 4y agoNot just Endjinn, I think vacuum dirigibles are mentioned in a few of the Culture novels.
- throwaway68979 4y agoThere are airships and dirigibles, but not vacuum ones (or at least, it's not mentioned they are) IIRC.
- deleted 4y ago
- ricardobeat 4y agoThis article wasn’t very convincing, but let’s play along: if this works it could make sci-fi floating devices a possibility. A drone or other flying object could float by pulling a vacuum (also not really feasible with today’s pumps) and control it’s density, without the need for any kind of reservoir. Maybe just enough buoyancy to massively reduce the power and noise needed on propellers. Add some form of wireless energy transmission (laser?) to remove the battery weight and voilà. UFOs!
- Robotbeat 4y agoYou can do all of that using helium (or hydrogen…) plus it actually works. (China’s recent balloon shot down over Myrtle Beach didn’t use propellers, but others have: https://twitter.com/mrjeffu/status/1621728807609843718?s=20&t=DZpOHCcaZbigSGz1FTTiBA https://twitter.com/mrjeffu/status/1621728807609843718?s=20&... )
- af3d 4y agoA 10 lb structure would have to displace something like 3500 liters of air (a cube with side lengths of about 5 ft). Maintaining a vacuum with such little material is highly unlikely, to say the least. Moreover, scaling the structure by a factor of 2 increases the weight by a factor of 8. So the researcher's claim that "in order to make them flow to air, we just need to make them bigger" just doesn't make much sense. The larger the "balloon", the LESS likely it is to be structurally feasible.
- gnopgnip 4y agoDoubling the length of the structure would quadruple the weight but increase the volume contained eight times.
- jws 4y agoAlso, maintaining vacuum is probably easier in larger units since the volume is increasing faster than the surface area. More gas intrudes, but there is much more space for it to intrude. The wildcard is what has to change for the thickness of the shell as it scales. That either makes it work, or be infeasible. More research required.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- KrugerDunnings 4y agoCan I suggest an improvement? Vacuum is also a great isolator and combined this with an internal hot air balloon, the inside can be made lighter by using hot air with the same pressure but lower density. The air is way less dense in the stratosphere so there must be some kind of equilibrium that can be obtained that once an object is that high it requires little energy to keep it there. These kind of blimps only get more efficient the bigger they get. I also have an idea for active vacuum isolation for housig, much better lifetime than passive vacuum panels. Too bad no known takes my vacuum engineering serious.
- SnowHill9902 4y agoThe answer to why none takes your vacuum engineering seriously is ironically in your username. Vacuum is a good thermal conduction and convection insulator in theory, but as soon as a little bit of moisture leaks into it, it’s toast.
- KrugerDunnings 4y agoPlease don't judge my theoretical ideas by your low engineering standards.
- jagged-chisel 4y agoI think your detractors are reading snark where humor is more likely.
- nickparker 4y agoActive vacuum insulation isn’t a thing because you need high vacuum to reduce thermal conductivity at all, because mean free path and therefore specific conductivity grows at the same rate density decreases until mean free path exceeds the characteristic length of your application. Also, modern VIPs have decades of life if installed properly.
- aaron695 4y ago[dead]
- quirkot 4y agoUghhh. 3 paragraphs telling you: that thing you like is actually bad and you are personally responsible for ruining science. Then, oops, only 10% of helium use is for parties.
- aardvarkr 4y agoThat’s a nontrivial amount of a resource that is a limiting factor to scientific research and other ambitions that aim for loftier goals than temporary amusement.
- RC_ITR 4y agoThe current known helium reserves are estimated to last (at current consumption rates) for 100-200 more years. Fwiw, all this non-renewable talk is only true in a world without space exploration or fusion (two things that will hopefully be more common 100 years from now). The noise about a shortage is because the US gov't decided to stop subsidizing storage and delivery of helium, and scientists untrained in economics see "losing a subsidy" as similar to "a shortage" since the net effect is the same - prices are rising. Culling recreational use would add 10-20 years of supply, which is unlikely to be the 'make or break' bridge to fusion or space mining. Let people have fun, it's arguably the meaning of life.
- guenthert 4y agoHope is hardly a strategy. Long term technological progress depends on social stability and economic prosperity and those are all but certain. Humans had thousands of years experience having fun w/o wasting non-renewable resources.
- RC_ITR 4y ago> Humans had thousands of years experience having fun w/o wasting non-renewable resources. Genuinely curious, are you speaking of pre-Bronze Age civilizations?
- quirkot 4y ago
- binarymax 4y agoWhy rule out hydrogen? In small quantities it’s probably not that dangerous, and it’s cheap to manufacture.
- jws 4y agoI just checked out a couple videos of hydrogen filled party balloons being lit. I think it’s safe to say it could be a pants wetting experience and likely ignite paper party decorations.
- simplicio 4y agoYea, Birthday parties mixing small kids, paper decorations, candles and hydrogen balloons seems like a questionable idea.
- xwdv 4y agoHe wasn’t asking if we should, he was asking if we could.
- mrandish 4y agoSince hydrogen is more buoyant than helium, I wonder if it could be mixed with something which reduces the flame? Either in the gas or in the outer layer of a two layer balloon. It just seems like if a substitute for party balloons is needed then exploring alternate gas mixtures might be low-hanging fruit compared to engineering lightweight yet low-cost vacuum structures.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- last_one_in 4y agoHmmm, interesting. Not sure if it would be much use for balloons but if you could make vacuum sections for walls then you could make super insulated walls.
- DonHopkins 4y agoSounds like a bunch of hot air.
- ChuckMcM 4y agoI first heard/thought about vacuum balloons when reading Diamond Age (which I can recommend as an interesting book!) and ran off and did a bunch of math and figured out how difficult they would be to build and use. However, on planets with a much denser atmosphere, they would be pretty handy. Having a platform hanging under, or sitting upon, vacuum balloons on Venus for example would make for a science platform that moved around the planet and could exist where temperatures were more amenable to current electronics. For those wondering about "the math", the simple version is to find the nominal density of atmosphere at the altitude you want to sit, take your material of choice and it's density. And then use (material_volume x material_density) < (atmosphere_volume x atmosphere_density), the amount of vacuum you need is then (atmosphere_volume - material_volume). You can plot it out, for every gram of material you need x cubic centimeters of vacuum. If you can find a solution where the material properties allow it to withstand the pressure differential, then you can, in theory, demonstrate a vacuum balloon if you can build it. Note that it will almost always be a spherical balloon as pressure on a sphere becomes compression strength of the material you're using.
- fwlr 4y agoLifting gasses provide two things: lift (of course), but also structural integrity: their desire to expand reinforces the structure containing them. Vacuum provides slightly more lift than helium but also provides negative structural integrity, since the atmosphere is actively trying to crush the vacuum chamber. From all accounts it would be a seriously challenging materials science endeavor to build something that could withstand containing a vacuum without adding more weight than the gain in lift, so in practice it would be very difficult to realise the 16% lift improvement. One method is to go bigger: because of things like the square-cube law, the lift provided by a vacuum container increases faster than the demand on structural integrity, so a sufficiently large container lets you use more conventional materials. It’s been a long time since I did the math and I wasn’t very confident of my calculations even then, but I vaguely recall if you used steel you’d be looking at containers with multiple cubic kilometers of volume or something - highly impractical. Another approach is only using vacuum in the upper atmosphere. The pressure on the vacuum container is much lower up there so you would have less of a structural integrity challenge. You don’t gain as much as you’d think from this approach, however, because the positive structural integrity provided by the expansion of lifting gasses allows for containers that expand, increasing their volume in response to lower air pressure (we call these containers “balloons”). In fact, because of this property, to a first approximation altitude has NO effect on the lift provided by a set amount of lifting gas (counter-intuitive, I know), and getting a helium balloon to STOP rising is a real challenge. Getting the vacuum chamber up high enough to make it safe to pull a vacuum is obviously a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem too, not to mention you’d have to bring the extra weight of a vacuum pump with you. Where this idea might work is if you’re coming in from space in the first place. Assembling the container in space means you don’t need a vacuum pump, and since you’re descending from above you don’t need a container strong enough to withstand containing a vacuum at sea level pressure. So this might have some use for putting floating structures into Venus’s upper atmosphere.
- MagicMoonlight 4y agoYes, in theory you can make a balloon with nothing in it that will magically fly. These people have not achieved it because it’s impossible to do in the real world. You need a material with almost no weight and infinite strength. And after all that, the meme balloon only has slightly more lift then hydrogen. Could have just made a hydrogen balloon.
- piloto_ciego 4y agoWe have that https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerographene https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerographene
- pontifier 4y agoI can't believe nobody has shown how violent vacuum implosions can be. Here are some of my favorite vacuum implosions: Train car imploding: https://youtu.be/Zz95_VvTxZM https://youtu.be/Zz95_VvTxZM Vacuum chamber imploding: https://youtu.be/qs6p8tPaur4 https://youtu.be/qs6p8tPaur4