Expert: Paul Soderman - 11/22/2009

Question
I am a second year engineering student. My lab partner and I have to make a 3 to 5 minute video on the concept of stress/strain. Where can I get more info on how these concepts affect the balloon and the break point for failure. we want to show the concepts with a small ballon in reference to a blimp or hot air balloon.    thank you.

Answer
Herbert
This is outside my experience, but I did find a good explanation on WikiAnswers:

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Why_do_balloon_pop

There are other references that you might be able to get better than I can:

http://www.springerlink.com/content/m53361k76p002305/
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1987AdSpR...7...19S

Basically we are talking stress loading the balloon skin, the skin gets thinner, molecules get oriented, the skin gets stiff and failure occurs when ultimate stress level is reached.  How to demonstrate that is the hard part.  I assume painting parallel (circumferential) lines around the balloon might be instructive.

Good luck.
Paul