The new method for opening floors to remove the extra large mana crystal seems to be working, and we were able to open the two highest level floors as a test. So fthe construction team working on that project can mostly handle it themselves with little oversight for the foreseable future. The lightstone facility has reached a similar stage where we''ve managed to make the first boiler work, including lowering dummy plates, so they''ll be able to replicate that construction a few times before I''m once again needed to help over there.


    All that to say that I''ll be able to start tinkering with the details on the Haber process. There are three different component portions for me to work on before I try to run my next test. First, I want to embed a fan inline with the reactor and storage loop to drive gas through the reaction chamber. I''ll be driving that fan electrically with embedded copper wire, and powered externally with a stirling engine. The second component that I need to work on is adding catalyst to the reactor. I recall that fine magnetite was used as a catalyst, but it had some additives and some treatments done to it in the reactor as part of the process, so I''ll have to do some tinkering to dial it in and make it more efficient.


    The final thing I need to add are heat plates around the reactor itself to bring it up to temperature. I believe that the temperature I need to get the reactor to is about 800 degrees Fahrenheit, which is about the melting point of zinc, meaning I should have a relatively easy way to test if I''ve reached a hot enough temperature.


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    Adding in the fan was a relatively easy process and only took six days. Similarly, getting a batch of finely powdered magnetite to use as catalyst also only took a few days, and a large part of that was carrying it from the dam to the area where I''m working on this project. I chose to build it in the valley behind the lab, close enough that I could easily make the hike each day, but far enough that it shouldn''t be affected by the amount of mana drain the lab experiences.


    However, adding enough heat fluorite plates to the reaction chamber to melt zinc ended up taking a considerable amount of time, and I had to try multiple different things before I could settle on a design that actually got hot enough. What I ended up needing was custom cut heat fluorite from large crystals, rather than the precut plates. By using fluorite of the large heat fluorite crystals, cut in half, and then a curve cut into them, I could put eight pieces around the reactor chamber, allowing it to reach a high enough temperature.


    Getting those custom heat fluorite pieces took four months though. In the meantime while I waited, I did a ton of testing at the condenser side of the reactor exhaust, where the ammonia should settle out as a liquid for recovery. Even without the reactor getting up to quite a hot enough temperature, I was still able to do some amount of testing as to whether I could fully cool the reacted gases or not.


    Thankfully, I shouldn''t actually need to cool them too much, as at the pressures we''ll be working at, even after the pressure drop in the reactor, ammonia liquid should condense well above ambient temperature. The main issue is that our pressure vessels are extra thick and reinforced with stone, meaning they don''t have great thermal conductivity. However, I was able to come up with a good solution, though it required a near complete redesign of the layout. We''re already bringing in liquid nitrogen, and then attempting to heat it in the boiler to gasify.


    So, I installed a counterflow heat exchanger from the reactor exhaust to the liquid nitrogen tank. That should provide adequate cooling for the ammonia to condense, as long as I''m careful not to let the temperature get too cold in the heat exchanger. This solution required that I also installed a large stirling condenser in the liquid nitrogen tank to re-condense any nitrogen that boiled back up the tank. I ran multiple tests again on the new design to ensure that it also held up to the pressures involved.This story has been unlawfully obtained without the author''s consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.


    Once, I was confident that everything was working again, I charged the reactor with the magnetite powder and started the first full trial run. While it wasn''t the most exciting thing ever, I did recover a small amount of ammonia. I didn''t actually have a good way to collect it in atmosphere, so when I opened the collection chamber, I just smelled the strong scent of ammonia with no liquid present, as it instantly boiled away at atmospheric pressure.


    To properly collect it, I''ll probably want to dissolve it in water to form aqueous ammonia. That process is quite exothermic, so I''ll want to be somewhat careful about how exactly I''ll perform that process. The general amount of ammonia I recovered was also quite low, so I''ll be tinkering with the catalyst for a while to see if I can increase the overall yield as well. Though finding a proper way to measure the volume of yield will be important as well.


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    I came up with what I think is a somewhat clever solution to both problems at the same time. The same pressure mechanism that releases new liquid nitrogen into the boiler when the pressure gets too low could also be used to drip water in parallel to the ammonia collector. Whenever liquid nitrogen is dripped into the system to replace lost nitrogen in the form of ammonia, water will be dripped in parallel into the collector. The more nitrogen reacts, the more water is put into the collector.


    Using this method, I was able to easily determine what helped or hindered ammonia yields whenever I changed something in the system. Over the course of four more months, I tinkered with the catalyst. I tried adding and removing all sorts of things, and even tried reacting it in a few dozen ways. The best results that I found involved two steps. First, a small amount of the waste powders needed to be mixed back in with the magnetite. Second, before being used, I needed to bring it up to temperature in the reactor while the whole thing was charged with hydrogen, but the fan was off. After cooking it that way for about six hours, it was done.


    Each of those processes on their own increased yield, but both together had the largest effect. Ultimately, the yield was high enough that I realized our liquid nitrogen production will be outstripped by this reactor. It''s capable of reacting around 25 gallons of liquid nitrogen in a day, which results in almost 500 gallons of our ammonia solution in water.


    However, we only produce about 5 gallons of liquid nitrogen a day, and the hydrogen production for this facility is quite small as well, meaning realistically, it''ll only operate in batches. Of the liquid nitrogen we produce, we use some of it for mining the fluorite deposit as a cooling agent. Based on those limits, we can really only produce about 50 gallons of ammonia solution a day without upscaling both the hydrogen and liquid nitrogen production.


    The ammonia solution itself has three immediate applications. First, by diluting it heavily, it can be used as a fertilizer. The second use is as a nitrogen source or as a base in research applications. Finally, the third use is as a cleaning agent. With a little extra work, we could also use it for nitriding our steel. Unfortunately however, the process to turn ammonia into nitric acid requires platinum as a catalyst to be efficient, so that''s off the table. Otherwise, we could use it to produce ammonium nitrate for explosives, or even just as a source of nitric acid itself. There are alternatives that we could attempt to produce nitric acid from ammonia, but given our limited supply of ammonia, we''d probably be better off using the Birkeland-Eyde process to produce it, even if it''s inefficient.


    For now, most of our ammonia will probably be used as fertilizer and as a cleaning agent. I still need to train some demons to operate this facility, and determine the amount of ammonia to use as fertilizers for the plants. Nitrogen sources like ammonia are quite rare and difficult to produce, but it opens up a ton of options moving forward.