lazenby asks:
and boyancy in air? is the lifting capacity of a hot air balloon equal to the modulo of the weight of the air in the balloon with the weight of the same volume of air outside the balloon?
for that matter, does the lift of a big helium weather balloon decrease as air pressure, and so weight of the air outside the balloon, drops? and is this exactly counterbalanced by the lessening density of the helium in the balloon?
all of these things keep me awake.
Hopefully you won’t be sleepless much longer. Buoyancy in air follows the same principles as buoyancy in water. Determining the lifting capacity of a balloon is a matter of determining how heavy the balloon can be before the buoyant force is equal to the weight. See the free body diagram and little derivation below to see what the maximum payload mass is for a helium balloon. You can click on the picture to enlarge it.
The second part of your question raises some interesting points. As a balloon’s altitude increases, the atmosphere around it gets colder and less dense, all of which should reduce the buoyant force. At the same time, the balloon itself expands to equalize the pressure inside and outside of the balloon, which should increase the buoyant force. (At some point the pressure drops sufficiently that the tensile strength of the balloon material is unable to cope with that expansion and the balloon bursts, but we’ll ignore that here.) For this problem, we’d want to know what payload the balloon can carry without losing lift, and, with a couple assumptions, that’s pretty easy to figure out. I’ve done that derivation below.
The real key to the calculation is assuming that the helium in the balloon maintains the same temperature as the air outside. Since balloons rise slowly, this seemed a more reasonable assumption than imagining that the balloon remains warm compared to its surroundings. That calculation is doable as well but requires more than a couple lines, unfortunately! Thanks for your questions!