Air Pressure In Footballs

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In order to explain how air pressure drops when the temperature does you would need to use the concept of the ideal gas law. This states that pressure times volume is equal to the amount of gas times the ideal gas constant times temperature. This formula proves that when it is cold, the pressure in a football decreases, causing it to naturally deflate itself. (Florio,2015) If footballs are inflated indoors and they are brought outside in a fifty degree environment then the pressure in a ball will drop when it starts to cool off. It would take no more than half an hour for the temperature inside the ball to be even with the temperature of the air on the outside. If the Patriots had filled the balls to twelve and a half PSI, pressure per square inch, in a seventy degree area then the PSI will drop by one after thirty minutes (Andrade, 2015.) …show more content…

Healey moistened the footballs because during the game it was roughly fifty degrees and there was a large shower of rain. When he did this the PSI dropped by about two, just like the Patriots' footballs that went from twelve and a half to ten and a half. More evidence also proves that some academic and research physicists now admit that they made an important mistake in their original calculations. After the error was fixed the amount of deflation predicted in moving from room temperature to a fifty degree field is roughly doubled. Healey measured the drop in twelve footballs that were moved from a seventy-five degree room to a fifty degree area, just like the Patriots. (Glanz,

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