I foolishly didn't design the fluorite testing room with secondary access, which means we actually don't have a safe way of getting mana into that room currently. Since we have very little cut quartz left, I've settled on a very rudimentary design for getting some mana into the area. I've built a 2-inch wide square pipe connected to the larger room, and surrounded the pipe with what little quartz we have left. The pipe has 3 small quartz gates installed, one in the testing room, one in the large main room, and one able to be opened from the middle room. This pipe ended up increasing the amount of mana in the testing room to about the same level as in the crystal growth room, but we needed a solution.
Since it seems like mana can flow even against air currents, I've decided not to attach any sort of fan to the system. Instead opting for a small quartz container that can be opened on the end of the pipe. There, we can put some of the charged mana crystals that we mined from the tunnel when we want mana to leak into the testing room. Of course, that also means I need to take a few days to transport some mana crystals here, so they can be charged and brought down for testing.
I spent five days getting the pipe installed, and Tiberius and his assistants have six different kinds of fluorite crystals they want to test. In addition to the three that I recommended, they've also grown pyrite impurity fluorite, lead impurity fluorite, and zinc impurity fluorite. The pyrite fluorite and to a lesser degree the hematite fluorite look a bit worse than the others. There are clearly shiny pockets of pyrite within the fluorite crystal itself, which makes me think it doesn't actually fit into the crystal lattice well. If I had to describe why the hematite looks worse, it's only when compared to the pure iron based crystal. The hematite looks somewhat cloudy, and the crystals are a bit more brittle.
I suspect that the oxygen isn't doing the crystal any favors, especially considering fluorine and oxygen are similar sizes, but oxygen has twice the charge demand, which is probably causing issues in the lattice. By comparison, the iron only fluorite is colored about the same, but is far less cloudy, and the crystals just seem more pure. Though until we do testing, we won't know for sure if they have similar effects.
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I had sixteen days until the next eclipse when I had decided to bring some mana crystals down to the lab area. Ultimately, I took six of those days getting everything ready, from distilling mana absorbing poisons to preparing crystal trays to bring over, leaving me with an extra ten days of time to fill. I took a day of that time to install more mana filters into the air supply for the fluorite lab, which did drop down the ambient mana even further, with regen values dropping to 1/40th of surface values. Unfortunately, it didn't seem to decrease the value in the two research rooms any further.
With fluorite production on my mind, I spent the remaining days mining fluorite, to ensure we had enough on hand for a few months of production. Then, on the day of the eclipse, I brought a few trays of mana crystals down to the intermediate lab where they could be charged before testing happened.
Since we're looking for observable effects from the new fluorite crystals, I had a few basic experiments prepared. One would consist of small water containers where a thermometer would be used to measure temperature differences. Another consisted of tall, clear, glass tubes, where again, water would be filled, and a crystal submerged to see if any gasses are produced. Yet another suspends a crystal on a string, to see if it produces any physical force. For now, those are what tests we're planning.
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While the sliding doors are made of glass, with quartz in between, they're actually still quite hard to see through, so one of the goblin assistants will have to be the one to observe the experiment and yell out what he's observing, so that Tiberius can write down the results. I've also informed them that after every test, they should take a few days to monitor everyone's health, to make sure that nothing dangerous was produced.
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The testing space is actually quite small, so to keep things relatively easy for the observation goblin, only three different kinds of crystals were used. The hematite, pure iron, and copper fluorite crystal samples were put into the three different testing apparatuses, as well as three just left on display plates.
I wanted to oversee how things went for this test, since the outcome could determine my next project, so the hallway outside the test chamber was quite cramped as Tiberius and I listened to what the goblin inside observed. He observed nothing. None of the crystals seemed to do anything. I went in after using a small amount of mana, and my mana regen was still basically zero.
We double checked the pipe and the mana crystal container, and everything seemed to be fine. I thought back for a bit as to how the air was so full of mana on the island before, and realized that almost all of our mana crystals were submerged in water, usually doped with a mana carrying material. So, I went to the surface and boiled some water with bark in it, and then brought that water down, stored it in a container, and brought that down to put in the container.
Upon restarting the test, the results were a little different, though the small crystals and low mana meant that the effects were minimal. That was the intent, however, as I really didn't want any horrific effects to come out of these tests. The hematite raised the temperature of the water ever so slightly, while the pure iron raised it nearly three times as high. The copper didn't change the water temperature, but did, in fact, cause tiny bubbles to form. None of the crystals seemed to exhibit any force output on the pendulum, and the fluorite just sitting on display didn't look any different.
Though these results are promising, we'll still wait to check if there are any adverse health effects before diving into these tests further.
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After four days with no adverse health symptoms, I had us repeat the tests, but with more of each color of crystal within their respective testing containers. More of the iron and hematite fluorite within the thermometer testing, and more copper fluorite within the bubbler. A flame test seemed to confirm that it was hydrogen bubbling out of the copper fluorite, and the pure iron fluorite seemed to be a much better heat converter than the hematite fluorite.
With those results in mind, I had the fluorite growing goblins in the main area halt their production. If iron doped fluorite is more effective at making heat per unit volume, then we should obviously convert our production to making that instead. We already have a handful of the 12-inch fluorite crystals made from the natural hematite fluorite, but I think I have a use for some of them, and those that I don't have a use for, we can always melt back down.
What I want to do is build an area just outside the lab where we can process the fluorite and make our different doped glass types, which can later be reprocessed into crystals. To do that, we first need to remove the natural impurities from the fluorite. We're currently doing that by repeatedly melting the glass down, and letting it solidify. Each time, it seems like some of the impurities drop out of the solution. Normally, smelting is a somewhat expensive process mechanically, and all three of our main smelters are built along the stream using a water wheel as the energy source to pump air into the smelters.
So, what I'd like to do is make a batch processing facility, powered by stirling engines using the natural heat fluorite crystals we already grew. The facility I'm envisioning would have two large smelters for melting a large amount of fluorite, multiple basins for casting the glass in, and mechanical grinders to turn the fluorite into small grains for melting as well as to make fine grains of impurities to add to the mixes. This also lets me do a trial run of a slightly larger stirling engine, so future designs might be a little bit more efficient.