The process of separating air is quite plicated, and I have multiple major hurdles to clear before I do so. The first step is making a funal cryocooler. This be aplished using a sterling engine, but I'll have to do a signifit amount of fiuning to make that work. My existing sterling freezers aren't that cold, and likely aren't even freezing carbon dioxide. That means there are signifit improvements that I o make before that work. I already know of a few areas where signifit improvements occur.

  The sed step is makial dewar fsks. I've already mao pull a pretty good vacuum using stone shaping before, so if I devise a way to utilize that before sealing off the walls of the fsk, we'll have the design for tainers for holding liquid air, as well as the distilled pos. I'll also want to use simir teology we'll develop here to help ihe distiltion n we'll make in the step.

  In air separation processes oh, air liquification and separation is done tinuously. Here, however, we don't have the means to produce facilities to the degree necessary to do so. I also ck multiple bits of critical information to do so. For instance, I don't actually know what the atmospheric pressure is here, which critically affects the boiling points of liquid air pos. I also don't actually know what the total air position is here on the p. If, for instanitrogen makes up far less of the atmosphere than oh, I would potentially imbahe distiltion n and waste all the stru effort. I also 't remember off the top of my head the boiling points of the gases in air, so I'll have to rediscover that.

  So, for the third, and hopefully final step of the process, I'll build a batch distiltion n. Using a batn, I'll be able to start separations, despite being unaware of the exact tents of the n. Since we're dealing with liquid air, the heated bottom portion of the n be substituted with a metallic heat sink to boil off the liquid air. The de the top of the n will be cooled using a rge cryocooler.

  If I have enough yers, then I should be able to pull of mixtures from the n tops repeatedly, with different batches being different positions of the air. Whichever gas boils first should be rgely the position of the first batch, and so on through the different gases. This won't get us to 100% of any gas, but it will give me multiple different samples that I use to start determining positions from.

  For instance, if the first liquid I pull off ences fmes, then it's liquid oxygen. If it doesn't, then it's some other atmospheric gas, likely nitrogen on. I probably won't be able to achieve temperatures cold enough to dense neon, hydrogen, or helium, nor do I expect the atmosphere to tain a rge amount of it. I also don't expect to be densing enough material to recover much xenon or krypton at this stage, as they, along with neon and helium, will likely be too rare to recover without processing very rge amounts of air.

  Since we're basically limited to using sterling cryocoolers, we'd need areme amount of them to produough liquid air to recover a meaningful amount of xenon and krypton, and we'd need a closed air system to isote neon and helium. So I'm really hoping that Argon is our target gas for mana crystals. Argon is the best didate though, followed by helium, just based on expected abundances, so that's encing.

  The first round of improvements was fairly obvious for the sterling engine design. The regeor o be pletely redesigned first. I hadn't put much thought into the regeor other than the fact it o be someorous. To reach cryogenic temperatures though, all pos of the engine are going to have to be as effit as possible. For testing purposes, that meant I wanted an ehat I could easily resize the regeor, and fill it with different pag material with high porosity.

  First, I worked with Karsh to make dies for makial wools. They're basically like the wire dies we made before, but instead of being perfectly round, they have a sharp edge that cuts into the hole, which causes a se of the wire to peel off. Those strands are then just buogether to make the metal wool. Since we have a few differeal didates, I gave the task to one of the goblin smiths to make a bunch of wools of each metal, and provide me with three different strand sizes of wool of each type.

  Initially, I'm going to just use steel wool in the regeor, si should be good enough for testing other pos until we get tenic temperatures. Once I actually get a stirling engine down tenic temperatures, then I'll experiment with the differeal wools, si those temperatures, I expect the metals to behave differently than they do at ambient temperatures.

  The sed improvement that I knew I could make was repg the air in the eh hydrogen. With the one fluorite crystal we bought which produces hydrogen, I collect a rge amount of it, then dry it (sihe act of bubbling it through water will evaporate water into the gas mixture), and fill the stirling eh it. Hydrogen should be a signifitly more effective gas for two reasons. Hydrogen should be a better thermal ductor than air, and I know that it liquefies at a much lower temperature than air.

  The third, and final, improvement that I knew I could make off the top of my head had to do with the general shape and design of the stirling engines I had made before. In short, they need better thermal designs to reduce general losses. I o make more portions from insutive pos like dried lightstone, while also adding ier heat exgers o side, to help remove the excess heat.

  Since I want to produce liquid air on the scale of gallons, I'll either need a lot of small stirling cryocoolers, or a few big ones. The general issue with rger coolers is being able to dissipate heat fast enough. I pn on building all the final pos at the hydroelectric facility to provide sistent power to the setup long term. That being the case, I realized that I utilize the mountain stream as liquid cooling to remove heat faster, so I decided to design a rger cryocooler.

  Though for testing purposes, I started with a smaller design, to get a feel for the general meics, si's much easier to repd redesign a smaller cooler over a rge one. I took a month just tinkering with various designs, and running them to check temperatures. By the end of that month, I'd gotten to the freezing point of the ethanol thermometers, and was able to make a small amount of solid CO2 from pre-dried air which had deposited on the cold side head.

  Unfortunately, below the freezing point of ethanol, I don't have a great way of cheg just how cold the stirling engine was getting, and without a dewar fsk to hold liquid air without it evaporating quickly, I couldn't really tell if I was actually at that cold of a temperature. So that was the hing on my agenda. If I have a dewar fsk, and we get to the point where air liquefies, then I test different regeor materials by measuring the total volume of liquid air in the fsk after a set period of time.

  Actually making a dewar fsk wasn't quite as difficult as I initially thought it would be, and I was able to make five half-gallon fsks in ten days with Karsh's help. A dewar fsk is just two tainers, with a vacuum between them. You want as little physical tact between the fsks as possible, to minimize any ductive heat loss. I'm sure the method I settled on probably reduces it's effectiveness by a small amount. We were able to mold steel into the shape we wanted for a double walled tainer a a small hole at the bottom. Then, using stone shaping, I slowly pulled a vacuum through that hole, and then sealed it with a rge dried lightstone plug.

  The downside of this method is that the lightstone plug is somewhat rge on both the inside and outside, so that it resist the vacuum causing it to break. Thus the fsks are a bit bulkier than I'd like, and the properties of the lightstone probably make it less effective than true stific grade dewar fsks would have. I did make special lightstoands for them though, so that the bottoms of the fsks aren't in tact with the ground as much, to help reduce losses a small amount. Though year, ohe reservoir is refilled, I want to try electropting fsks with what little silver we have, to further reduce losses due to radiation.

  The fsks seemed to work well, a boiling hot water hot for a siderable amount of time. With a few fsks ready, I finally try to make some liquefied air.