Balloon Lift

by Jonathan Lowery

Submitted : Spring 2012

In the examination of this problem the question arises as to how this affects us, why is this important? Today your average balloon is not meant to carry much mass but when you scale this up to say  the size of a hot-air balloon the need to know maximum payloads does show itself. While this approach only makes use of a balloon of ten meters along its axis of symmetry the general approach is the same as long as you scale up your other results.

The general approach is to make use of approximations based on the data using techniques from Calculus to discover the volume as well as the surface area. This information is used along with Archimedes principal to discover the maximum payload this balloon could support. For this project it was determined that the maximum payload this balloon could support was between 52.851 kg and 53.221 kg depending on which approximations were used. Based on these results a slightly larger balloon could carry your average sized adult or equipment for monitoring the weather.

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