8300 feet was the elevation of the cabin we stayed at just outside Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado. Before leaving there, I put an empty plastic bottle with the cap screwed on tight inside my bag.
Upon arriving at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago, the bottle had collapsed down to this shrunken state due to the air pressure difference at different altitudes.
https://www.spudart.org/blog/images/2005/322-2292_IMG_300.jpg
Chicago: 660 feet
Colorado Cabin: 8,300 feet
It’s really quite amazing to see how the bottle just shrunk down so much according to the different environments. Using this logic, would a bottle explode going from Chicago to Denver?
I pack products that are under pressure in ziploc baggies before I put them in my dopp kit. I had a can of shaving gel explode once and was glad it didn’t explode all over everything in the kit.
Answer is yes, it will explode if its a completely sealed container, like an unopened Mountain Dew may very well explode and soak your clothes with sticky greenness.
it’s like Slimer!
Actually, can’t you do this just by going up in a commercial airliner, period, regardless of the altitude of your departure/arrival destinations? The real altitude change, after all, is that between ground and air.
Hi Well , it is quite obvoius that the presure decreases with altitude but can anyone please tell me that the air flow or the fluid flow is because of energy or pressure differnece ?
Hi, It won’t explode in a commercial airliner since cabin pressure in these planes is equal to pressure at approx 6000 – 8000 ft. However, it would explode if you took it high enough up into (or even out of) the atmosphere. Given the strength of these bottles, I think it might need a really high altitude to explode though. The shrinking is a direct consequence of the gas law: Pressure * Volume = constant as long as you don’t change the number of gas molecules. If pressure decreases (which it does at approx 120 mm Hg per 5000 feet) volume increases. Later, Fabian