The basics of the Birknd-Eyde process are pretty straightforward. Lightning strikes have enough energy to break nitrogen and oxygen bonds, and allow the freed atoms to bond together into nitric oxide, which further oxidizes into nitrogen dioxide. The difficulty in the process is mostly in developing a good method for trolling the electrical bursts and cooling down the released gases. Certain portions of the process, like geing high-voltage, high-frequeric current, shouldn't be too difficult with our current teology, and it shouldn't take much more work to also gee a DC voltage to drive aromago trol the arcs, though tuning it will probably take some time.

  After we actually start to gee the nitric oxide, we choose to split the gas into different pathways, one for making nitric acid, and one for making sulfuric acid. I'll also need vessels and pos that won't oxidize, breakdown, or melt in the ditions the reas will take pbsp; Gss, lead, and purified lightstone are good choices for these, though steel will probably o be used and repced occasionally for things like the arc electrodes.

  Since I collected all the pos I needed in advance, I was able to speed through assembly for quite a few of my initial test parts. I used two small mana eo drive a geor aromag respectively, and used steel electrodes inside a gss rea chamber with a transformer and a basic eleag outside to try to trol the electric arbsp; I built a heat exger on the downward side with lightstone, and a water based i check valve to ensure one dire of gas flow.

  Building out that apparatus took twenty days. Of course, the first run wasn't great. Some fixes were pretty straightforward, like a rger check valve and more of an air gap between the gss rea chamber and the electrodes i. Other ges to get it w to a good degree ended up taking another 44 days before I was fident that I would be capable of upsg and still making things work. A major difficulty roperly cooling the hot gas products as well as getting the design for the trolliromago work.

  The heat exger I'd designed didn't have nearly the total heat transfer necessary to tinually cool the product gases. I ended up ging it to a closed loop water heat exger with a sedary copper radiator and pump to cool the gases much faster, which meant I needed a third mana engine. The eleags also o be tuo be something approximating opposing disks partially enpassing the rea chamber. The result was cool disk shaped electric arcs that seemed to produce the most product gases.

  Once I got the design somewhat funal and capable of produg nitric acid by bubbling the gasses through water in a gss chamber, I thought it would be a fairly straightforrocess to upscale produ. There were a few major issues that made me realize that wouldn't be the case. With the upscaled electrical power and the need fer eleago trol it, heat became a major issue.

  I found that I o focus on keeping the eleag cool, and o ge various aspects of the electrical tact desiging in needing to ge the eleag design again to at for the ges to the internals. What I thought would be a retively simple process ended up taking 106 days. The final design ended up so far removed from the initial design that I've realized I should have probably speime optimizing the small design once I ossible to produitric acid with an approximation of the method.

  Now, however, we have a facility capable of produg a nitric oxide, nitrogen dioxide, and nitric acid at a moderate scale using a few rge mana engines. The actual output, if run for a full 24 hour period is about 12 gallons of nitric acid. I haven't tried titrating it yet, but it reacts violently and for long periods of time with a sample of calcium carbonate I brought along, so it's probably at least somewhat trated. I'll try to do a crude titration with soda ash, which is more water soluble, to determine a more precise tration.

  The hing to build will be the lead chamber and sulfur buro let us make sulfuric acid in industrial quantities. After that, it's a fairly straightforrocess to produce diethyl ether and nitrous oxide to use on the eagles. For diethyl ether, you just o mix sulfuric acid with ethanol in a temperature trolled enviro, and then distill the products. It'll take some testing and iy to get it w well, but I don't expect it will be too difficult, at least when pared to some of the other projects I've worked on. Nitrous oxide is a deposition produmonium nitrate, though we'll have to be careful there as well, si's explosive.

  Adding in the lead chamber for produg sulfuric acid retty straight forward, and sihe nitrogen dioxide is funally a catalyst in the rea, though there are losses due to it's gaseous nature. Ultimately, building the lead chamber and sulfur burnior to produce sulfur dioxide took 33 days. Rather than using a true "lead chamber" I'm using a lead packed bed of beads, to make the process more effit. So the beds are long ders that end up having their own water sheath and radiator setup to remove the excess heat the rea produces. In the same 24 hour period that we could make 12 gallons of nitric acid, if we redirect all the product gasses into this process, we make 70 gallons of sulfuric acid of unknown tration.

  So, the hing I was obviously ied in was a good approximation for the tration of the two acids. So, I began the long process of titrating them. The first step was calg the differeies of both acids, theurated soda ash water and pure soda ash. I had to keep in mind that soda ash is a double base, nitric acid is a single acid, and sulfuric acid is a double acid as well. I , at least, get an approximation for the mor masses of these acids and bases because the atoms are low enough on the periodic table that I get close by just using double their atomiumber. I probably have some error, but I 't recall the exact average atomic masses for each element anymore.

  Titration ain because I also didn't have access to any indicator fluids, so I essentially had to repeat the experiment over and ain, while taking tiny samples of the mixture, and dripping it on a solid base to see if it reacted at all. It wasn't very precise, but ultimately, I did get numbers for the two acids that were probably within about 10% of the actual morities.

  After 20 days of testing aing, I came up with about 55% solution by weight for nitric acid, and 70% solution by weight for sulfuric acid. Which would mean they're pretty strong acids over all. By mority, that'd put nitric acid at about 12 M and sulfuric acid at about 13 M, if my approximate mor mass calcution is correct for each type. If that's accurate, then these are quite trated acids.

  The processes I want to work oomatic thermal regution systems to allow me to more precisely trol reas. Until now, most of the reas I've worked on have either been thermal excess reas, or self regutiions. I didn't actually o trol them very accurately. Now, however, we're moving into that territory. So, I have a few devices that I pn to try to develop moving forward.

  First, the bimetallic strip, which allows automatic triggering of certain effects at a known temperature. Sed, very basic eleic circuitry to allow the bimetallic strip to plete a circuit for trol purposes. Third, servo motors to allow electrically driven motion for trol purposes. While we could gh the intermediates of other trol processes, beginning the process to develop electrical trol systems will be any future projects greatly, so I believe that this basic first step will probably be worth it.