# Tag Info

112

It will make it lighter, but the effect will be very small. The volume of the tube is probably less than a liter. One mol of an ideal gas is 23 liters at atmospheric pressure. So you have about 0.2 mol of gas in there at 4 bar pressure. Helium weighs 4 g/mol, nitrogen about 28 g/mol. So for 0.2 mol, the weights are 0.8 g and 5.6 g. Cleaning off the dirt from ...

80

The spirals are used to prevent the formation of Kármán vortex sheets downwind of the chimney. They work by diverting the wind upwards on one side of the chimney and downwards on the other, creating a three-dimensional airflow pattern that disrupts the vortex sheet. Without them, the vortex shedding could cause vortex-induced vibration in the chimney, ...

78

I think that most of the answers here are incorrect since it has nothing to do with decreasing resistance of rubber. In fact, the force required to stretch the balloon increases, not decreases while inflating. It's similar to stretching a string, ie. the reaction force is proportional to the increase in length of the string - this is why there is a point ...

64

When you say "why aren't things being destroyed", you presumably mean "why aren't the chemical bonds that hold objects together being broken". Now, we can determine the energy it takes to break a bond - that's called the "bond energy". Let's take, for example, a carbon-carbon bond, since it's a common one in our bodies. The bond energy of a carbon-carbon ...

63

If the air was still, body heat warms a thin layer of air next to the skin. This warm air would stay near the skin, separating it from the cold air. Wind, however, continuously blows away this warm bit of air, replacing it with the colder surrounding air. There's a similar effect on humidity. Evaporating sweat increases the humidity right next to the skin, ...

62

I doubt that it even has a cooling element, i suspect that it is just a fan + humidifier. The fan+humidifier is the cooling element for this unit. It uses purely evaporative cooling to reduce the temperature of the system. It can do this because the phase change between liquid and vapour requires energy. By just passing a convective current of relatively ...

56

No. Boiling itself doesn't mean that the water will cook anything. If you have boiling water at 30°C you could touch it (if we forget that it's at really low pressure) and nothing would happen. Boiling is not what cooks, but temperature. In fact, if you want to purify water at high altitudes, you need to boil water for a longer time because it will be at a ...

55

(photograph credit: Efram Goldberg) [Note: left-most ampule is cooled to -196°C and covered by a white layer of frost.] $NO_2$ is a good example of a colorful gas. $N_2O_4$ (colorless) exists in equillibrium with $NO_2$. At lower temperature (left in Wikipedia photo), $N_2O_4$ is favored, while at higher temperature $NO_2$ is favored. For a gas to have ...

52

A hot air balloon, or a helium-filled balloon floats in air, so either might meet your criteria. If you're looking for a solid material, perhaps a sphere of very sparse aerogel, with its outside surface sealed with a thin layer of plastic then evacuated, could come close to what you have in mind. But whatever the "material" is, it would need to have a ...

49

We also know that in reality a lead feather falls much faster than a duck's feather with exactly the same dimensions/structure etc No, not in reality, in air. In a vacuum, say, on the surface of the moon (as demonstrated here), they fall at the same rate. Is there a more formal mathematical explanation for why one falls faster than the other? If ...

47

When you would enter the water, you need to "get the water out of the way". Say you need to get 50 liters of water out of the way. In a very short time you need to move this water by a few centimeters. That means the water needs to be accelerated in this short time first, and accelerating 50 kg of matter with your own body in this very short time will deform ...

46

I drew an image to illustrate the forces at play. For any curved surface of the bubble, the tension pulls parallel to the surface. These forces mostly cancel out, but create a net force inward. This compresses the gas inside the bubble, until the pressure inside is large enough to counteract both the outside pressure, as well as this additional force from ...

46

Sound intensity is measured on the dB scale, which is a logarithmic scale of pressure. The "threshold of hearing" is given by the graph below: which tells you (approximately) that 0 dB is about "as low as you go" - the "threshold of hearing". Note that sound signal drops off with distance - we will have to take that into account in what follows. If you ...

42

No. All parachutes, whether they are drag-only (round) or airfoil (rectangular) will sink. Some airflow is needed to stay inflated, and that airflow comes from the steady descent. Whether your net descent rate is positive or negative is a different question. It is quite easy to be under a parachute and end up rising (I have done it myself), you just need an ...

42

While the summary you cited is a convenient and easy to understand phrase, it is a paraphrase of another cited paper: Sun H., Xu Z., Gao C., "Multifunctional, Ultra-Flyweight, Synergistically Assembled Carbon Aerogels", Adv. Mater. 25 (2013) 2554–2560. The paper says: The density was calculated by the weight of solid content without including ...

41

From a purely temperature point of view, not human perceived level of hotness, it is better to point the fan outward. This is because the fan motor will dissipate some heat, and when the air is blown outwards, this heat goes outside. This is all assuming the room has enough ventillation cracks and the like that the pressure inside is still effectively the ...

40

First of all, gas molecules are not invisible. There are plenty of elements whose gaseous state is quite colored, but these (iodine, e.g.) are in such rare amounts in the atmosphere that the net effect is not discernable to the eye. Next, if you Google for "atmospheric transmission curves," you'll see all sorts of spectral absorption going on, again at ...

40

Wikipedia gives a pretty much straightforward answer. In an ideal gas, the speed of sound depends only on the temperature: $$v = \sqrt{\frac{\gamma \cdot k \cdot T}{m}}$$ So it neither decreases, nor increases with altitude, but just follows air temperature as can be seen in this graph:

39

Theoretically no you wouldn't hear or feel anything but obviously in reality not all of the wind is going the exact same direction and speed.

36

This is due to the principle of dielectric breakdown. During thunderstorms, the air between the cloud and the ground acts like a capacitor. When the electric field is high enough, the air partially ionizes, at which point there are free electrons to carry current and the air becomes, essentially, conductive.

35

You don't want to lose energy – not only because of energy efficiency but mainly because the desire to achieve high speeds and reduce the deterioration of the wheels – when the wheels are changing their shape due to the pressure caused by the weight of the vehicle. If you want to squeeze the wheels with rubber by a centimeter, you need a substantially ...

34

Take a strip of balloon rubber and pull it. It will get harder the more you pull. So why is it that inflating the balloon gets easier (at least long before the breaking point)? The balloon starts with very high curvature, so the air pressure is distorting each spot on its surface a lot relative to its 1cm neighbors for example. All the rubber's tension ...

32

Air and water are both transparent to a good enough approximation. However, light travels more slowly in water: the speed of light in air is about 33% faster than in water. As a result, when light passes from one medium to the other, it is partly reflected and partly refracted (bent). For the refracted part, the general rule for determining the bending angle ...

31

What is happening is that there is a volume of air under the thing being dropped, which has to make its way out the sides. As the distance gets smaller, the air pressure under the object increases while the air is escaping. Try a flat board, then drill some holes in the board that account for maybe 10% of its area. Despite being 10% lighter, the board ...

30

Helium has been used in racing bicycle tires for indoor track (velodrome) events. The helium will decrease the overall weight of bike and rider only slightly, and it will somewhat reduce the angular momentum of the tires. There's also the possibility that helium is more "elastic" than normal air or pure nitrogen, which would reduce rolling resistance, but ...

29

Taken from this site: Yes, air can indeed make shadows. A shadow occurs when an object in a light beam prevents some of the light from continuing on in the forward direction. When the light beam hits a wall or the ground, a darker shape is visible where less light is hitting the surface. Both the light and the shadow, which is just the absence of light, ...

28

In a blower, the air is directed along the axis of the blower as it exits, creating a high-pressure narrow cone. Exit pressure can also be multiple times of atmospheric pressure. At a sucker entry, the low-pressure zone is fed by a much wider angle of atmospheric air at atmospheric pressure. Additionally, the underpressure can at most be 1x atmospheric ...

27

No, mostly You mostly can't boil water by spinning the glass. "Mostly" because some weird stuff is possible under extreme conditions like in a rotary evaporator; in such cases, whether or not there's "boiling" starts to become an issue of semantics. That explanation of aerodynamic lift is a common misconception First, to correct a ...

26

Your two questions are connected. There is a huge amount of empty space in aerographene (and other aerogels). However this space is filled with air, and precisely because it is filled with air it doesn't float. This is because the density reported is the density the material would have if the air was sucked out (i.e. in vacuum), and it is so low because ...

25

It would be possible in theory, but only in a very side-thinking way: if you make a parachute so large it encapsulates the whole Earth, it will in effect act as a balloon and not fall down, due to the internal pressure of the atmosphere. This wouldn't work in practice for obvious reasons, but maybe in Kerbal you might be able to do something like it..

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