Air Bubble Machine experts

The first-ever bubble wrap Brand “Pop” Poll stress survey found that 77 percent of Americans are more stressed or as stressed today than they were one year ago. Close to one-third of the nation (32 percent) believes that there is a better shot for the national debt to be erased than a life without stress.

As part of the 12th Annual Bubble Wrap Appreciation Day, Sealed Air Corporation, the makers of Bubble Wrap brand cushioning, conducted the Bubble Wrap “Pop” Poll to gauge the current stress level of Americans and reinforce the surprise stress-relieving benefits of popping Bubble Wrap. The survey, conducted by Kelton Research, reveals that just over one minute of popping Bubble Wrap provides stress relief equivalent to a 33 minute massage.

The survey also shows that Americans who have popped Bubble Wrap in the last seven days are less stressed about their health than those without as much recent Bubble Wrap material popping experience. The “Pop” Poll also found that 69 percent of workers would take a pay cut to ensure that they would never be stressed on the job again.

“Bubble Wrap was originally intended as a form of textured wallpaper, but has transformed into an unexpected “pop” culture icon, becoming most recognized for the satisfying release that comes with the popping of each bubble,” said William V. Hickey, President and Chief Executive Officer, Sealed Air. “Bubble Wrap Appreciation Day is the one day that fans from around the world can truly relieve some of their daily stress by popping Bubble Wrap materials.”

Sealed Air Corporation’s Dr. Pop sifted through the Bubble Wrap “Pop” Poll results (posted on www.BubbleWrapFun.com) at the Sealed Air headquarters in Elmwood Park, N.J., to reveal many different triggers that cause stress and unique ways that Americans would handle their anxieties.
Stress Hits Home
Close to four in ten (38 percent) of Americans polled would rather never encounter an ounce of stress again than win a new home worth 100 million dollars.

The Northeast Needs Some “Pop” Relief
Thirty-six percent of Northeasterners are likely to feel stressed more than 10 times in an average month compared to 26% of the rest of the country; this makes the Northeast region the most frequently stressed in the country.

Blue is Better!
Almost one in two Americans (43 percent) say that the most relaxing or soothing color is Blue.

Don’t Pop Alone, Try A Famous Friend!
According to the “Pop” Poll, over one in four Americans said that they would have the most fun popping Bubble Wrap with Ellen DeGeneres (26 percent) with Will Farrell coming in second (18 percent).

Easy Rider
Recent Bubble Wrap poppers are less likely to be stressed out by unpredictable events when traveling, such as missing a flight (52% vs. 59%) or a hotel losing their reservation (39% vs. 43%).

Despite the attempts of imitators, there is only one Bubble Wrap; a product which has transcended its intended use of protecting valuables to become a “pop” culture phenomenon. Bubble Wrap brand cushioning has inspired users to come up with hundreds of different uses. For more information on Bubble Wrap brand cushioning or the Bubble Wrap “Pop” Poll Stress Survey visit BubbleWrapFun.com.

Bubble Wrap Appreciation Day

Bubble Wrap Appreciation Day is celebrated every year on the last Monday in January.

The originally intended use for Bubble Wrap was entirely different than how it is used today. Inventors Marc Chavannes and Al Fielding originally developed a plastic they hoped to market as textured wallpaper. When that idea did not take off, the inventors began to have some success marketing the product as a greenhouse insulator.

Chavannes then realized that Bubble Wrap brand cushioning could be used as an improvement from paper and old newspapers for cushioning fragile items. Once the opportunity was identified, the inventors worked hard on the manufacturing process for Bubble Wrap cushioning in an effort to create an ideal packaging material. After a lot of tinkering, they developed a special, proprietary barrier protection which prevented air from leaking and resulted in the crisp “Pop” that Bubble Wrap is famous for.

The first-ever bubble wrap brand “pop” poll stress survey found that 77 percent of Americans are more stressed or as stressed today than they were one year ago. Close to one-third of the nation (32 percent) believes that there is a better shot for the national debt to be erased than a life without stress.

Sealed Air Corp., the makers of bubble wrap brand cushioning, conducted this poll to gauge the current stress level of Americans and reinforce the surprise stress-relieving benefits of popping bubble wrap, the company stated. The survey, conducted by Kelton Research, reveals that about one minute of popping bubble wrap packaging provides stress relief equivalent to a 33 minute massage.

“Bubble wrap was originally intended as a form of textured wallpaper, but has transformed into an unexpected pop culture icon, becomingmost recognized for the satisfying release that comes with the popping of each bubble,” said William V. Hickey, president and CEO of Sealed Air.

OK, whether bubble wrap actually does help to reduce stress or not is up for debate. However, a recent study did state the demand for protective packaging is set to increase by about 5 percent per year to $5.9 billion in 2016, according to The Freedonia Group, Inc., an industry market research firm.

Wrapping your gifts in bubble wrap is particularly vital if you’re packing delicate things like glasses or CDs or DVDs. If they’ll be mailed over long distances, correct wrapping becomes even a lot of crucial. Bubble wrapping can make sure that they’re shielded from friction and minimises the impact if the things are hit throughout transit. it’s simply obtainable from packaging provides stores and quite cheap too. thus you’ll be able to go ahead and obtain your friend her favorite album while not fearing that the CD case can break before she receives it.

Bubble wrap possesses variety of qualities that build it an automatic selection for wrapping presents that may be posted throughout the festive season to loved ones. As we’ve got already stated, it possesses protecting qualities that are essential for delicate things. The sponge-like protection it offers is beneficial for not solely DVDs and glass; it’ll conjointly keep porcelain and therefore the vulnerable screens of electronic devices safe from scratching and breakage. It conjointly simply takes the form of the item you’re wrapping, thus whether or not angular or curved, bubble wrap can simply cowl it and be sealed tight with tape if necessary. you’ll be able to use paper for this purpose, however there’s the chance of it scratching delicate surfaces and conjointly the chance of it tearing, leaving your things exposed.

If you’re smart at recycling, you will not even ought to obtain the wrap. With the heightening concern over plastics and therefore the risk their disposal poses to the surroundings, you’ll be able to do your bit by reusing bubble wrap from a gift you received yourself or from an item that
you simply bought that was delivered in bubble wrapping. Or using what was left over from after you moved into your house. it’s thus a decent plan to unwrap parcels fastidiously and preserve packaging materials like bubble wrap, cardboard boxes and plastic baggage for reuse.

However, if you’re probing for a particular styleof bubble wrap, you would possibly simply need to obtain it. Most parcels come back wrapped within the common clear bubble wrap which can not do if you would like to send your gift in colored bubble wrap. Or the wrapping you have got in store might have little bubbles and you would like larger bubbles. In most packaging retailers you may be able to realize these variations of bubble wrap and a lot of, as well as the metallic colored kind.

Editor’s Note: This is a theoretical discussion. We in no way recommend that you try this. In fact, we urge you not to.

This was on Reddit:

How much bubble wrap would you need to wrap yourself in if you wanted to jump out of a first story window and survive?

Why would anyone ask a question like this? Why would I even attempt to answer it? It’s what I do, that’s why. I serve the Interwebs. Perhaps someone in the Reddit comments has already answered this – but I shall proceed anyway.

Before I start, I would like to change the question. I am pretty sure you can jump out of a first story window without any bubble wrap. Here I am
assuming first story means second story window (or one floor above the ground). Really, this shouldn’t be too difficult to jump from this high. Here is my dangerous jumping calculator. Essentially, the important thing is how far do you travel while stopping. It can be done.

The modified question will be: How much bubble wrap do you need to survive jumping out of the 6^th floor of a building? Let me randomly say this
is a height of 20 meters.

Where would you start with a question like this? Well, first, we need some bubble wrap. What properties can I even measure from bubble wrap?

How thick is bubble wrap?

Yes, there are many types of bubble wrap, but here is a stack of the stuff I used.

To get the thickness, I will make a plot of the height of the stack vs. the number of sheets.

The slope of this linear fitting equation is 0.432 cm/sheet. So I will go with this for the thickness of one sheet.

What is the density of bubble wrap?

Not sure if I will need this, but here it is anyway. I cut the sheets into rectangles (for a reason you will see shortly) that had dimensions of 8.8 cm by 14.3 cm. From above, the height is 0.432 cm. This gives a volume per sheet of 54.3 cm³. To find the mass, I added the stack (one sheet at a time) on a balance. Here is the mass per number of sheets with a linear fit.

This line has a slope of 0.922 grams/sheet. So the mass of 1 sheet is about 0.922 grams. From this, I get a bubble wrap density of 0.017 g/cm³.
Note that this includes the buoyancy of the bubble wrap, so it isn’t the real density. This ok, since I will be looking at these in air anyway.

How springy is bubble wrap?

As you push on bubble wrap, it compresses. Does it act like a spring? I don’t know. Here is what I am going to do. I will take my stack of 14 sheets of bubble wrap and measure the height of the stack as I add more mass on top. Here is a picture.

If I think about the forces on the mass on top of the stack, I could draw the following force diagram:

Since the masses are in equilibrium, the magnitude of the force from the bubble wrap must be equal to the magnitude of the gravitational force. This gives me a way to easily determine the “spring” force from the bubble wrap. If the bubble wrap acts like a spring, then the force it exerts on the masses should be proportional to the amount the wrap is compressed. If I call the compression amount s, then this would be:

Where k is the spring constant. So, here is a plot of force vs. compression.

The slope of this line is 906 N/m, so that is the effective spring constant for this particular stack. Oh, notice that it looks fairly linear too (that is nice). So, you might think I could just use this to model a collision with a body wrapped in bubbles now, right? Not so fast. What if I made the stack twice as high? Would it have the same spring constant? Not likely. Why? Think of each sheet as a separate spring. All of these sheets have the same force pushing down on them (if I assume the weight of the sheets is small compared to the force) and so they will compress the same amount. If I have 10 sheets that all compress 0.1 cm, the total compression for the stack would be 1 cm (10*0.1 cm).
The result is that the bigger the stack, the lower the effective spring constant Also, if I have a larger bubble wrap sheet, there will be more “springs” next to each other to push up on the weights. If I doubled the area of the sheet, the stack would only compress by half as much. So, a larger sheet makes a larger effective spring constant. Maybe you can see that what I really need is Young’s modulus for bubble wrap and not the
spring constant of an individual sheet.

Young’s modulus is a way to characterize a material that is independent of the dimensions of that material. It is defined as:

Using the data from above, I get a Young’s modulus for bubble wrap with a value of 4319 N/m².

With this, I can find the effective spring constant of any amount of bubble wrap.

Jumping

It isn’t the jumping that is dangerous, its the landing. The best way to estimate the safety of a landing is to look at the acceleration. Fortunately, I
don’t need to collect experimental data on the maximum acceleration a body can take, NASA already did this. Here is essentially what they came up with (from the wikipedia page on g-tolerance):

From this, you can see a normal body can withstand the greatest accelerations in “eyeballs in” position. This is the orientation such that the
acceleration would “push” the eyeballs into the head. In the case of jumping, this means landing on your back.

I would normally start with my dangerous jumping calculator. However, there is a problem. The previous calculation determined the acceleration of the lander assuming a constant acceleration. If I am going to model bubble wrap as a spring, then the acceleration would change has the jumper stops. Here is a force diagram of the jumper while stopping:

In terms of forces and acceleration, I can write (now just in they-direction):

So the acceleration depends on the value of the spring constant as well as the distance the spring (bubble wrap) is compressed. I don’t know either of those values. Let me get another expression for the spring compression. Suppose I take the jumper, the Earth and the bubble wrap (spring) as one system. In that case, I can write the work energy principle for the jumper starting at a height h above the ground and ending with the spring compressed.

Just to be clear, the jumper velocity (and thus kinetic energy) of the jumper at the top and the bottom are both zero. The gravitational potential
energy is mgy and the spring potential energy is (1/2)mv². I now have two expressions with both k and s in them. This will let me solve for k:

Just to be clear, I am putting the maximum acceleration in for a. Also, I have made the assumption that the stopping distance (s) is small
compared to the jumping height. But the expression looks ok.

Let me go head and get an expression for k. Here are my starting values.

• m = 70 kg. I am assuming the total mass of the bubble wrap is small compared to the mass of the jumper. I can check this  assumption later.
• a = 300 m/s² (assuming the collision is   less that 1 second – should be a valid assumption).
• h = 20 meters (as stated above).

This gives a spring constant of 1.7 x 10⁴ N/m.

How much bubble wrap?

Now that I know the spring constant needed to stop the jumper, I am one step closer to determining how many layers of bubble wrap would be needed. There is one thing I need to estimate first – the area of contact between the ground and the bubble wrap. I know this area should actually change during the collision – so I am just going to estimate it. Suppose the contact makes a square about 0.75 meters on a side. This would give an area of 0.56 m².

I know Young’ modulus for the bubble wrap, so I can find the spring constant as:

Here L is the thickness of the bubble wrap. Solving for L:

With a sheet thickness of 0.432 cm/sheet, you would need (14.2 cm)/(0.432cm/sheet) = 39 sheets. That seems low, but that’s what I get.

How much bubble wrap?

If I need 39 layers of bubble wrap, how much total would that be? Let me assume that it wraps around the jumper to make a cylindrical shape. Here is sketch.

Looking down on a person, the person is about a cylinder with a radius of 0.3 meters (just a guess). If the bubble wrap cylinder extends another 0.142 meters, then what is the volume of bubble wrap? Oh, I guess I have to have a person height of about 1.6 meters (another guess). This would give a bubble wrap volume of:

Good thing I already calculated the density of bubble wrap. This gives a mass of 9 kg. Not too bad, but this technically would change the amount of bubble wrap needed to land. Just for safety, maybe I would add a couple more layers.

What about the size of this bubble wrap falling person? Would this change the air resistance on the person? Certainly. Would it change it enough to matter? I am going to guess: no. When falling from only 20 meters, the falling person probably won’t reach terminal velocity. Oh, don’t believe me? That is ok, I don’t really believe myself either. How about a quick python calculation.
Here I will use the following model for the air resistance (as I always do):

Where ρ is the density of air, A is the cross sectional area, and C is the drag coefficient for a cylinder. In this case I will assume the cylinder is falling with the axis of the cylinder parallel to the ground (so the person would land on the back). In this case the cross sectional area would be L*2R. I will use a drag coefficient for the cylinder with a value of 1.05.I will skip the details of the numerical model, but here is a plot of a falling cylinder both with and without air resistance from 20 meters.

Ok, maybe I was wrong. The cylinder with air resistance ends up with a slightly lower speed (17.8 m/s instead of about 20 m/s). Should I redo the
calculations? No, just count it as a safety factor.

Final Answer

I am going to go with 39 layers of bubble wrap. Should you actually do this? No. Don’t do this. Well, I guess you could do this with a dummy or
something.

One more quick question. I wonder how much bubble wrap you would need to survive jumping out of a plane. You might not need too much more since all that bubble wrap would also slow your terminal speed down.

In the end, maybe you shouldn’t pop that bubble wrap. It might be useful someday. (WARNING: jumping out of a window is not a good idea – just to be clear)

Rhett Allain is an Associate Professor of Physics at Southeastern Louisiana University. He enjoys teaching and talking about physics. Sometimes he takes things apart and can’t put them back together.

Who would ever think that an accidental discovery by two men can become one of the most popular packaging and the most revolutionary way
in the packaging industry? Marc Chavannes and Alfred Fielding discovered the very popular bubble wrap in 1957 and since then, it has become one of the most revolutionary ways to make sure that the material that is about to be sent will be safe during the entire shipping process.

For sure, you are pretty familiar with how a bubble wrap looks like. This is commonly seen in new packages most especially in those fragile ones, particularly in mugs, glasses and almost anything that needs to be protected during shipping. This is a plastic-like substance with thousands
of tiny circles filled with air. This is the reason why it had been tagged as bubble wrap the bubble like circles filled with air protects your package from damage when shaken, or when dropped. Kids (and most adults also do) surely love the fact of popping these bubbles right after opening the package. However, for product sellers and business owners, this is an important part of their packaging process, thus essential for you to know where to actually get these kinds of wraps.

If you own a business and ship the packages to your customers, you may want to make sure that the purchase will be sent to their delivery address free from scratches and damages due to shipping. As much as possible, the package must be free from chipping, scratching most especially from breaking this is a big responsibility of the seller and must be taken into account. For these needs, a bubble wrap is the perfect solution for this. As
mentioned earlier, this discovery was founded last 1957, and due to its major advantages in the packaging, storing and shipping industry, people still make use of it, and continue to maximize and enjoy its benefits.

The size of the plastic film, as well as the air cushions (or the bubbles around the covering the plastic) may come in different sizes. It now depends upon the distributor and the manufacturer which size to use the bigger the package, the larger the bubble wrap. Since it has been in demand and
had already been a necessity in the packaging industry, there are tons of resources wherein one supplier could get these bubble wrap. The internet itself provides lot of information as well as resources on where to find a bubble wrap supplier, along with the price and what is included in the purchase.

If you are looking for a bubble wrap supplier, just like finding any other product or service in the market, you have to be certain that the product, company or service that you are going after is from a reputable source with positive reviews from different customers. This way, you can spend
and maximize the rest of your time, and not waste money on companies or bubble wrap manufacturers that are not worth it. Remember, the quality of a bubble wrap may vary make sure you choose only the highest quality to make sure that every penny spent is worth it.

by Jaclyn T. Dupuis