Fixing the two crystal growing apparatuses took a few days, but I ended up spending nineteen days on the mountain modifying all the other apparatuses to also allow for use of an external gas source. I also took inventory of all the crystal waste material we have on hand. It's about 600 cubic feet of the waste material, which would also be cutting it close for growing a crystal about the size of ParTor. If I factor in that I'd likely be starting from a crystal that is already two-feet tall, and that we do have other mana crystal material, then we should have enough material, once we get the argon for the project.
That said, the argon isn't going to be made very quickly. In order to make more liquid air, we'd need an even larger production area for it. The dam just doesn't really have enough available power to do so, and wind power won't cut it. In theory I could build multiple smaller facilities along the stream using water wheels, and then transport the liquid air to the distillation column, but that would produce so little liquid air compared to the resources used that it's probably not worth it.
I have thought about the idea of using fluorite crystals to produce heat to boil water to drive machines, or used directly in a stirling engine as the heat source. In theory, that could work, but it does come with a few engineering problems of it's own. While individual crystals can produce a decent amount of heat, the bigger the area of crystals the less effective they are at actually converting mana to heat.
I theorize that the mana has issues penetrating into a pile of crystals before potentially being rejected outward. So while four crystals might, in theory, produce 50 watts of energy in the form of heat, sixteen crystals in a similar area may only produce 100 watts. While there is still a net increase in heat, there are significant losses of efficiency. A single crystal with the mass of the four original crystals, by comparison, might produce 100 watts on it's own. These numbers aren't exact, obviously, but they're observation based heuristics, using the research I did on the fluorite crystals before.
Now, there are a few solutions to that problem. One potential solution is to simply grow large enough singular crystals that they boil water without overheating themselves to the point of melting. If I grow the crystals deep underground, I could grow them obscenely large, then cut slices out of them, so they have very large surface area, while still maintaining a fairly large volume. Depending on the actual amount of heat they produce, I could space these sources out and combine their steam lines to power a large steam engine. A turbine would be better in place of a steam engine, but without stainless steel, a turbine would likely be too high maintenance and the design would be much more complicated.
A second solution, and my own preferred option, would be to simply install a large mana crystal upstream of the water inlet, providing a mana rich water as the source thus increasing the output of the individual crystals. The issue with this, obviously, is that it puts the cart before the horse. We currently are trying to make a large enough crystal to put on the surface again, so we definitely don't have a spare to use on this.
A second problem with this potential process that I fear might happen is something I'm going to call mana stripping. We already noticeably felt the loss of mana in the water when the crystals that had been submerged in our stream broke. If I then used that same stream to boil water with fluorite crystals, I have a feeling it'd consume the remaining mana in the stream, leaving none for anything downstream. Never mind the fact that we'd want to use a condenser to recover the water we boiled.
If, instead, I tried to go with a stirling engine design, I'd run into multiple problems. First, stirling engines actually are fairly low power, and our large cryocooler actually does require a decent amount of horsepower to work. Second, these power generating stirling engines would basically need to be run with air as their operating fluid, rather than hydrogen. The hydrogen engines, while much more efficient, require more maintenance and a constant supply of hydrogen. We only have a small supply of hydrogen, so it would be impractical to use it here.
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There are many design challenges involved in making these stirling engines as well. I'd basically need to design a standard crystal cut, like I did with quartz, so that I could easily make stirling engines that could have said crystals embedded in the hot side of the engine. Figuring out how to grow fluorite, and determining what inclusions produce what effects would potentially let us produce hydrogen on a larger scale, as well as allow us to make decently sized crystal plates to use for producing heat.
After thinking through all those possibilities, I'm really inclined to try to resume fluorite crystal growth research. It seems like a real contender as a magic shortcut to sparking an industrial revolution, since we'd exponentially increase our available energy to drive machines. If we could get the heat in the fluorite deposit under control, I'd like to get some other people to start extracting more of it. I suppose I could always check to see if any of the goblins have gained heat resistance, though I doubt they'd also have stone shaping.
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While I worked on the new dewar flasks and stirling engines for the cryogenics facility, I checked in with our records, and while we do have goblins with heat resistance, none have stone shaping. They're really quite different groups if I think about it. The goblins with heat resistance all work around the various furnaces, and they generally only handle already processed ores. At first glance, it'd seem reasonable to just use a pressurized air pipe to bring cooler air from outside into the fluorite mine, but that would introduce a large amount of mana, just heating the whole area again.
As I installed the new cryocoolers in the cryogenics facility, I realized that I obviously have a solution right there. When we pull of liquid nitrogen and liquid oxygen from the top and bottom initially, we can remix those cryogenic fluids into a slightly more oxygen rich solution than normal, and transport a few gallons of the mixture to the mine. I'd need to make a basin where it could be poured out to evaporate, but I'd suspect that it'd only provide a few hours of reprieve. While it couldn't run all the time, it'd at least let people other than me extract the fluorite, plus it's a straightforward use for our byproduct cryogenic fluids that doesn't require much additional work to use.
As I thought about the stirling engines, I also realized that we could keep subpar crystal clusters of fluorite in the greenhouses for salt evaporation. The extra heat should increase the rate that the water evaporates, making them even more productive. All this will have to wait for next year, when our first actual batches of cryogenic fluid are made.
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After finishing all the work that I had planned to do for the next cryogenics year, I first checked in on the mine. There were a few changes that had happened since last year. First, the exploratory tunnel was continuing to be extended. They'd run out of crystals to harvest that they could find. With the dwarf who has his own version of tectonic sense, I don't even need to be the one to scout for materials. It takes him a bit longer to scout all around the tunnel at various points than it takes me, given his sense is in a straight line, and his total mana pool seems quite a bit smaller than mine. Since he works all the time though, it's a few days a year that I don't have to spend, so I'm happy.
The large metal ore deposit earlier in the mine is also practically depleted. We actually do have quite the large stockpile of metals backed up now thanks to this deposit, so I'm hoping it will last us at least until we find another deposit. After discussing with Zeb about our stone demands, it seems like we're still operating with quite an excess of stone for construction.
So, I decided to change how we're operating in the mine as we build the tunnel. Rather than transport stone all the way out of the mine, some of the stone is being used to fill in the large mined out area. We're taking a small amount of the nicely cut stone, and using that to make support pillars at frequent intervals in the pit mine. Then the space between the pillars is being filled in with any loose oddly shaped stone, gravel, and sand made using pulverizers. After four or so feet has been filled in, stone shaping is used to make a foot thick solid layer of stone, then the process is repeated.
Ultimately, the time saved by not having to haul stone all the way out of the tunnel is lost on having to haul it to the bottom of the pit. However, I don't really like the idea of leaving a large hollow space under the mountain like that. If we had an earthquake or similar event, the hollow pit would likely cause catastrophic failure of the land above it. By filling it back in, at least some of the potential damage will hopefully be mitigated.