I have a 20 year old pontoon boat. The pontoons (logs) are of the small variety. When I encounter choppy water, it is common for the water to lap up onto the deck of the boat. My question is: If I pressurize the air in the pontoons making it hold more air, will it float higher off the water than if the air is not pressurized?
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- No, but if you float it in mercury, it will. - DougC
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If the pontoons don’t expand, you’re out of luck. Just adding more air, but not changing the size of pontoons won’t help much.
Try adding helium. I don’t know if that last remark is serious or not.
It will float lower. More air (under pressure) means greater mass, therefore more weight. (It may be a trivial amount that you cannot even measure, but that would be the result.)
Helium would not help unless you substituted exactly as much helium as you currently had “generic” air–the helium presumably being lighter. If you put in the helium under pressure, you would have the same problem you have with air. If you could substitute exactly the same volume of helium for air, your change in buoyancy would again be trivial. In order to provide actual lift, a helium ballon must displace a lot of air.
Actually, you want less air, not more. Less air weighs less than more air (for an equivalent volume), so ideally you’d have a vacuum in the pontoons. However, that’s probably not practical, and even if it was, the difference (as tomndebb mentioned) would be negligible.
On a 20 yr old boat, you may have some water in there. Water doesn’t aid bouyancy at all. Do you have inspection ports?
–Nott
I used to drive pontoon boats for sort of a second job…3-4 times a week, this is what I’ve learned. Don’t hit the waves head on…quarter into them ) turn the boat so that the waves hit roughly the front corner of the boat. It gives a much smoother ride and you don’t get the wave slop into the boat. If I wanted to give the folks a fun ride I’d go parallel to the waves and have them hit the side of the boat…(it can throw people from their chairs). I only hit the waves head on when someone up front was pissing me off