If
we look around, we’ll definitely find some amazing physics almost behind everything of our universe, and a bursting balloon is surely in that list. With
the help of a high-speed camera and a blade, a French physicist Sébastien
Moulinet explored exactly what happens when a balloon bursts. Moulinet with his
colleague Adda-Bedia studied that how a balloon burst in correlation with the
tension set by the inflation level of balloon. They discovered that it is not
just the internal pressure that bring it about to split in one of two ways but
also the thickness and curvature of balloon membrane.
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source: home.carter/Flickr
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When
a particular inflation occurs, many cracks appear in the balloon.
This concept is not only applicable for
balloon but also for glass. Moulinet says “The higher the stress, the more
elastic energy is stored in the balloon, and then the more numerous the
fractures need to be to release the stored energy". The balloon having
flat sheets of latex clamped over a hole and punctured at the apex, once they'd
reached a certain level of inflation, they exploded in an octopus-like shape.
These tears of balloon spread out at a high pressures.
That
is related to the research of Michael Marder of the University of Texas. Marder
had become bewildered by the shape of tears left by the burst balloons but the
Moulinet and Adda-Bedia explains those shapes in more detail in “The Physical Review Letters”.
The
researchers determine that "Fragmentation occurs when the crack tip speed
attains a critical velocity for which tip splitting becomes the sole available
mechanism of releasing the stored elastic energy, given the general character
of the fragmentation processes, this framework should be applicable to other
crack networks in brittle materials."
