Balloon inflation revisited

Abstract

In the present work, an inexpensive setup of an experiment of balloon inflation is described in order to measure its pressure and diameter. As already children know from blowing into such a (toy) balloon, the initially necessary high pressure level decreases with increasing balloon diameter. The original intention of this project has thus been to quantify this effect, which from a theoretical point of view is known as material instability. With a corresponding instrumentation of the test setup, it is additionally possible to realise and analyse further results for different load scenarios such as loading and unloading cycles, which are able to (re)produce by the presented system quite as easy.

Keywords

• Balloon inflation
• Experiment
• Hyperelasticity
• Material instability
• Parameter identification