I had a few months left before winter, so I started work och distiltion tower. A major problem I'm going to run into with the tower is pressure. The tower will be densing and evaporating air, f yers of different trations of liquid, meaning equilibrium might actually occur at a higher pressure than I'd normally want. Unfortunately, with our teology at the stage it is at, I 't really trol that without doing a few years worth of researbsp; I already don't know what the air's overall position is, nor do I know the exact ambient pressure. Both would py a critical role in being able to properly size the batch distiltion process to avoid those sorts of issues.

  So instead, I'm going to aim for overkill of the process. A batch distiltion tower is basically a bunch of yers in a tower, where the bottom evaporates the material that we're trying to separate, and the top has a deo liquefy it again. Then, we need a way to pull material from somewhere ich process, in this case, I'll be using the top of the tower he denser, with a sedary collector he bottom, in case I if something breaks.

  I had initially pnned on just using a few small cryocoolers for the denser portion, but I'm now ined to make the sed rge cryocooler, and have its cold pistohe denser. If I could thermally isote the distiltion tower effectively, then I'd be more fident in using a smaller cryocooler, but we'll likely be dealing with some amount of heat gain throughout the tower that the main denser is going to be dealing with.

  The bottom of the tower needs an evaporator, but given the cryogenic temperatures involved, I actually don't think I'll need a heat sourbsp; Instead, I pn on just making a copper heat sink to transfer heat from the ground directly into the distiltion tower at the base. I also o figure out what volume I want to process at a time, as that determihe size of the heat sink and the tower.

  On one hand, a rger batch process ultimately means I extract purer product, and it should also be more effit. As the n increases in size, it's surface area to volume decreases, meaning the outside of the process has a lower pertage of influen the temperatures in the process. However, the higher surface area also means that there is an overall increase in total thermal energy leaking in, whieeds to be removed from the process somehow.

  Ultimately, the current cryocooler produces about a gallon of liquid air every three or four days. Meaning that realistically, I could maybe process five to ten gallons in a batbsp; While I could try to go higher, I'd o design a rger dewar fsk to store more liquid, and give that fsk it's own small cryocooler to help prevent loses over the time it takes to fill another tainer. Given I don't know that muformation about the atmospheriposition, overkilling it with a ten gallon process might be a bad idea.

  With distiltion processes, the more indepe yers you have, the better your separations are, at the cost of needing more thermal energy and a loime to reach equilibrium. Layers I make aren't going to be perfect either. In high quality separations, yer design is highly important to getting good efficies. Each yer will house some amount of densed liquid, and some amount of gas passing over top. Each tray in a yer needs a weir to hold some amount of liquid, and a way fas to pass through.

  From memory, having raised holes iray in each yer that the gas rise through is a somewhat effective method. The inside of the n will be metal, with metal trays, but it will be encased with dried lightstoo give it some degree of pressure resistanbsp; Then, I want to have a partial vacuum gap, simir to the dewar fsk, and a sed yer of dried lightstone. Then, outside that, I want an air gap, which is cooled with a stirling cooler. All of this is to try to remove as much thermal influence as possible from the outside world from the n.

  Five gallons of liquid isn't actually that mue either. I wao try to make twenty yers in the n, but that might be unrealistic giveal volume of material I'm w with. The n is going to end up being quite small, but that's probably for the best. Ultimately, I want to have a bunch of different tray designs made before I start testing, so I s them out quickly, and then make requests for rays once I have an idea of what I might want.

  I'm going to have to do a lot of fiuning to make it work, and I'll o e up with some testihods to determine how well I'm actually separating products. The best test I think of is that I put dewar fsks of equal mass on a bance, aract liquid from the top and bottom of the n of the same volume, and measure the mass differenbsp; The rger the mass differehe higher the purity of the the gases oher side. The biggest fw with that is being precise with the volume of liquid gas in each fsk, but if I make the fsks tall and thin, it should minimize that problem.

  Building out the n took a bit lohan I had hoped, because I kept running into multiple different problems as I built different parts. First, because I wahe partial vacuum yer and an outside cooling yer, I ended up having to partially promise on that design so that I could have easy access to ging designs within the n itself. So, about 80% of the n is surrounded by that design, and twenty pert is designed as three removable wedges that are re-attached with stone shaping after any modifications are done. Meaning modifications will have ara hour or so of work added in any time I want to do so.

  Sed, Rather than have to ge the design of the building we're in, I ended up doing quite a bit of excavation into the ground to put the n in. The top with the denser sits at ground level where the rge cryocooler piston is. The bottom sits about fiftee underground, with copper being used as the heat exger, embedded into the ground to try to improve heat exge on that side.

  Third, designing new dewar fsks as well as the valves to pull material out of the n took some time. Getting everything right for a mass bance was retively easy. Thanks to thermal hands, I activate it along the rim of a dewar fsk to attempt to evaporate a little extra of the liquid in one side of the bance if they aren't quite even.

  After all was said and done, we only have 20 days of winter left, meaning we have about 30 days until I start using the dam as a power sourd start testing. Since I have just about everything ready, I'm going to go do my agreed upon leveling for the year again. I'm both excited and afraid to finish this final step of the process. In the best case, we make a ton of massive mana crystals. In the worst case, I've wasted a few years making a liquid nitrogen facility that we barely have any use for, if I get the n w. If I 't, then we have a liquid air facility, which I'm not sure what uses we have for.

  Initial testis were awful. I expected bad results, but everything was basically mixed throughout the whole process, and that was after fixing multiple leaks and breaks that occurred during the first few tests. The biggest problem, by far, is that it takes a little over a day to modify the n for aest, since I have to wait for it to warm up some, then disassemble and reassemble everything. I am thankful that the produ of liquid air at least keeps up with the n's losses of gases from extra and mass bang, so I wasn't waiting for more liquid air produ before I had to run aest.

  After a month of making various ges, I started to get the most minute of results, and it was because I had made a really dumb mistake. The rger denser retty much overwhelming the passive heat sink, and the rock that the heat sink was attached to wasn't able to keep up. While I initially sidered trying to use water, I had a brief epiphany, and exposed the heat exger to air, and cut a bunch of the rger fluorite heat crystals to fit the existing design, and attached them to the heat sink, and that worked, giving small results.

  Unfortunately, I then had to take another month of time restarting oray experiments. However, I did start to see marginal improvements through various testing. Followiis, I ultimately added more space to the evaporator at the bottom, and a rger tank for densation, and charged the n with more total liquid, which helped. I also started narrowing dowray design necessary for the whole process at that point.

  After another month and a half, I'd gotten to a point where I was fident that I was separating the liquid gases to a high degree with the n. Meaning I could start testing on those purer gases.