This relates to the difference between how a real gas and how an ideal gas behave in this scenario.
The difference in this situation will be very small in my opinion, broadly because the gas molecules in the atmosphere still have comparatively high mean free paths and therefore won’t interact with the “escaping” helium molecules.
I work for an acquired startup that tried to solve this problem.
It’s been around 8 years and we’re up to 50 or so people. I’d say we are okay at it.
We haven’t gotten fundamentally better over time recently, it’s more like there is some asymptote of how much you can really tell with a certain amount of insight into the systems between source and destination.
The only real progress we’ve made has been integrating with more and more sources of information about the state of the network.
Since this hollow core would be much larger than the crystalline structures in a metal would this not therefore be a very weak comparison?