I did e up ao improve how I'm doiing while I was levelling. For one, while the ethanol thermometers do freeze before they're directly useful, I could cool a metal object down and submerge that in a sistent quantity and temperature of water, and measure the resultant water temperature. That will at least let me pare trial runs to see how cold things are getting in each run. Thanks to thermal hands, I shouldn't have much of an issue with getting the initial temperature set for the water either.
I had a copper ball made that was three inches in diameter, and I had ser dewar fsks made, which could fit the new cold-side pistohrough their opening. That took a few days of the start of spring to do, along with gettira testing pos made, but the reservoir does still o build up some more volume before it'll be useful, so I didn't actually waste aing time. I'm also fairly fident in my choice of lead wool for the regeor, so that's at least one po of this rger cryocooler that I won't o test.
I had hoped that I'd be able to do two tests a day with the rger cryocooler by using the metal ball for thermal tests, but I actually have a different limiting factor. I only produough dry hydrogen to charge the rger cooler's internals with once a day, so I'm still limited in my avaible tests.
I have four main pos I want to do testing on, the hot-side heat exger, the hot-side piston, the regeor, and the cold-side piston. Uhe previous tests with the smaller cryocooler, repg each of those pos is actually a det k of bor from me and the bcksmiths. Eapo likely has some degree of effe the other po's sizing as well, so ging any one will affect the other's performances, making the testing somewhat difficult.
So I've made only two versions of eapo for now, designed in the way that I suspect they might perform better. I have sixtees pnned, using each of the possible binations of pos. From that, I'll try to get better insight into how the pos i at this rger size, and then make another set of pos, a the testing cycles through spring.
The first round of tests were very disappointing. In faone of them froze the ethanol thermometer. However, I did get insight into what dire to go for the set of pos. I kept the best bination of the testing pos, and then made new pos that were more exaggerated in the dire they were going. The hot-side piston became wider with a shorter travel distahe hot-side heat exger tubes became slightly rger with fewer tubes in total, the regeor became longer and thinner, as did the cold-side cooling piston.
The new pos for testing took another five days to make, followed by another sixteen days of testing. After the sed round of tests, two of the sixtees were able to freeze the ethanol thermometer, and required using the copper ball to start estimating their performance against each other.
It took three more rounds of this style of testing before I started to zero in on the best designs for the pos in this figuration, which brought us out of spring and into early summer. I wasn't dohough. Some of those figurations had started to produce liquid air, but I had only hit he target. Each of the tests prior to this had involved fairly rge step ges in po designs.
I resigned myself to using all the avaible dam time this year for testing, and then moving on t on the separations year. I did five more rounds of refining of the design before the reservoir was depleted beyond the point of being able to drive the piston. The st two rounds were very marginal in their improvements as well, so I'm quite tent with how this cryocooler works. In fact, the building itself was very chilly despite the season by the end of everything.
The final yield of the rge cryocooler came out to be about a third of a gallon. Which might not seem like much, but sidering where we are teologically, it actually is quite impressive, I think.
In the year or so I've worked on this project, I've basically ed a ton of other projects that were ongoing, so I took the time to examihose ier detail before I returo start designing the batch separation n.
First, I checked in on how all the mining was going. The tunnel progress had slowed somewhat as more resources were diverted to looking for mana crystals. They have found some, but the crystals are fairly small, and the deposits are far fewer in han they were around the cave. They're still expanding out to find more pockets within the yer, but the yields have been abysmal. Though having some crystals are better than having no crystals. They've set up a small ste room just before the crystal bearing yer, and have filled a handful of small crates with mana crystals, so we do have something.
One of the dwarves seems to have gained enough levels that they've gained access to their linear rock scouting ability that Konkur showed me. So they're basically digging tunnels from one pocket to the , guided by his ability. I let them know that if they run out of pockets, they should just resume digging the tunnel forward, and not to stress over tinuing to find mana crystals here.
The hing I che on was how all the experiments with Tiberius weween refrigeration and mana isotion. For the most part, things went quite well, and he's developed quite a list of results. While there doesn't seem to be an easy way to determine in advance what ste method will work best for a particur extract, they basically all fall into one of three categories.
The first are extracts that survive being frozen, and are indifferent to being isoted from mana or not. Only a siract, the fish which throws its spines, seems to fall into this category, but it's ceivable that others will as well. The sed type are those that survive being frozen, but do need mana isotion as well. About half of the extracts fall in this category, ao basically st indefinitely when frozen. They all experiene amount of effectiveness loss, but that seems to e from defrosting them, as they lose the same amount of effectiveness whether they were thawed either a day or a year ter.
The final type are those that be from being cold and mana isoted, but break down once frozen. The remaining half fall into this category, including the mana poison type extract from the mountain pnts. Unfortunately, everything in this category also seems to break down somewhat quickly, even when refrigerated. The lo stiracts lost about a quarter of their potency over the year. The mana poison pnts lost about two-thirds of their effectiveness over the same period while being refrigerated. Making refrigeration of the mana poison practically pointless.
We also had the sedary experiment going with cut quartz, which yielded the results in lih what I expected. The rger cut quartz blocks performed better in isoting internal materials from the same thiess of the smaller quartz blocks, but both seemed to perform better than the randomly packed natural crystals. My guess is that the naturally packed crystals still have too many air gaps, so while they provide a det k of isotion, it's not nearly as much as tightly packed crystal blocks.
With those results, I went to the quartz cutting area, and spent ten days adding in some new produ lines. First, I added an even rger size blobsp; While very few of those blocks will ever be made, having the option iure to use them will probably be valuable. Sed, for all three lines, I also added a fun to the block cutters. The ability to make half blocks in both height ah. I don't want many of those made, but if we have multiple yers of cut quartz, staggering the spaces between them by using half blocks will probably improve the mana isotion effiewhat, and even if it doesn't, it'll improve the resilience a wall made that way against physical colpse.