What happens when you inflate a balloon on a submarine?
Would it be harder to do? Are submarines pressurized like that? It always seems that way in the movies (Like, they have to pressurize the submarine to a higher PSI than the water-pressure around the ship)?
Am I just misunderstanding how pressure and submarines work? I have this image now of going to deep, and a rivet shoots out and pops a super-dense balloon someone blew up at under 2000 feet.
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nothing it’s like inflating a baloon on an airplane
Lungs are much like balloons, but I don’t hear people saying it’s harder to breathe on a submarine.
It’s a problem similar to the canary in the cage in the moving elevator.
The air inside a sub is maintained at normal atmospheric pressure. The resistance to the tremendous pressure outside the hull comes from the thickness and geometry of the hull, not from the air pressure inside.
If the air pressure increased and decreased with the depth of the sub, the crew would get the bends during rapid depth changes.
So the baloon would behave exactly as it does on land. Boring, I know.
No that’s awesome that makes a lot of sense. I’m just physics-tarded right now.
To get really picky about it, how difficult it would be to blow up the balloon wouldn’t have anything to do with the pressure of the surrounding air anyway, as long as both you and the balloon were under the same pressure. It’s always going to come down to a contest between the strength of your cheeks and diaphragm vs. the resistance of the rubber.
Well, if you fill up a large helium balloon (stored under pressure in a small bottle) eventually the submarine will rise to the surface. It’s like the (fake) balloon boy ride we heard about.
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