Why does a helium-filled balloon lose pressure faster than
an ai...

Question

Why does a helium-filled balloon lose pressure faster than 
an air-filled balloon?

Accepted Answer

Welcome back everyone. We have a true or false example. Helium filled balloon loses pressure faster than an air filled balloon because helium has a smaller molecular mass than the components of air. So let's begin by first making note of our molar mass of helium. So from our periodic table, we see that that's a value of 4.003 g per mole. Now we want to recall our major components of air. We would recall that that would be nitrogen gas and oxygen gas. Making note of the molar mass of nitrogen gas and oxygen gas from our periodic table, We see that we have a molar mass for nitrogen gas being 28 g per mole. And for oxygen gas, we see that on our periodic table we have a molar mass of 32 g per mole. So what we want to recall now is a term known as a fusion. And let's spell that correctly. So it's E F F U S I O N. Where we want to recall that a fusion is describing a process. We're gas particles passed through a small hole. So if we know that our helium particles based on the molar mass filled in our balloon here have a lower molar mass than the air. And as they're passing out this balloon, it's going to happen much faster than the nitrogen gas and oxygen gas molecules would enter the balloon being the rate of diffusion into the balloon where we have a higher concentration of our oxygen and nitrogen on the outside of the balloon making up our oxygen in the air. Or, sorry, making up the air in general, where we have a lower concentration of just helium within our balloon here. So we're going to recognize that this statement is definitely a true statement as our final answer. I hope everything I explained was clear. If you have any questions, please leave them down below and I will see everyone in the next practice video.

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