Abstract The introduction of StratoFilm® in 1965 solved a number of material related problems that had plagued the balloon community prior to that time. As payloads and float altitudes increased over the years, the balloons also became much larger. Unfortunately, in the late 1970's and early 1980's the catastrophic failure of stratospheric balloons began to reappear which naturally eroded the confidence of the scientific users. At the same time balloon manufacturers intensified their efforts to produce the high quality film so necessary for a reliable, low cost platform operating in the stratosphere. This paper describes the efforts taken by one manufacturer to produce a consistently high quality film for this application. The approach taken was to blend newly developed resins such as linear low density polyethylene with other polymers to achieve the desired properties. The resulting film designated as StratoFilm 372 has enjoyed a 100 percent successful flight record for over three years. In addition, this paper will describe a new resin which has been designed to achieve even superior properties to those now in use.
New balloon materials
Advances in Space Research ; 13 , 2 ; 13-16
1992-01-01
4 pages
Article (Journal)
Electronic Resource
English
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