Initial stages of building out a facility for making sodium hydroxide and hydrochloric acid from sea water went pretty well. With the help of three stru teams, the buildings necessary were being structed about as fast as I could draft the design for the facility. We've built it in the sed valley, dispg two old salt evaporation ponds to make room. In essence, all we o make this work were a few basic materials.
First, we trate down salt water to a bri saturation. , we easily electrolyze the salt water, creating chlorine and hydrogen gases and leaving behind a sodium hydroxide mix as a liquid. Doing so requires a specially shaped gss taio separate the gases ahe voltage and amperage low in eadividual taihere was a small intermediate problem we had to solve with making a good electrode for the chlorine side of the rea, as it readily destroyed most metals we tried to use, but we had two tricks up our sleeves to solve that.
While we may not be quite at the stage where roduce actual graphite rods easily, we could still produce det carbon based electrodes. It required a few extra steps in our pelletization process, such as an acid wash, produ of a rger, usable electrode, and thereatment in a nitrogen atmosphere to increase the electrical quality. However, after two weeks of work, I was able to make a low quality carborode. Since even a graphite electrode would probably break dowime, this will do as a process for us for a time. The other electrode seemed to work well enough using steel, although it too would slowly break dowime. With a ready supply of iron and carbon though, it shouldn't be much of a problem.
It was retively easy t in a Derator powered by a mana eo produce the necessary electricity for the electrolysis process. The hydrogen and chlorine gases produced by electrolysis are theed slowly in a thick walled gss chamber. A small static spark is used ihe reactor to start the rea, and a cooling jacket of water flows around most of the taio keep the exothermic rea from getting out of hand. Mas is slowly introduced into the chamber via one-way valves, and new sparks are introduced as o keep the rea going. The chamber itself has an i for fresh water, which pools at the bottom, and be drained off in the form of hydrochloric acid.
Ultimately, the whole facility took us just under a month, at 29 days, to build out. It produces about 40 gallons of sodium hydroxide and hydrochloric acid each a day, and the tratioo be about at 10 Mor. While we were w on this, I had the different demons who processed fish begin stockpiling rendered fish fats for us to use with the sodium hydroxide to produce the glycerol we needed.
In that month or so of work, we had 3 leviathan body parts wash up on shore. One was clearly the final third or so of an eel leviathan. The other two were quite odd, and aren't from ahan that I'd seen before, which led me to believe that there are probably leviathans along the sea floor that we never see.
One part seemed to be from either a sea-star like creature, or something with hardeentacles, given it's tapering appearanbsp; It was hard to tell, based on just how much it had already beeroyed, but it seems to have both a subdermal shell, and a cartiginous internal rod down it's length.
The st part only be described as a massive top half of some kind of bivalve shell. What was inside, however, is long gone. Some of these parts are actually something of a windfall for us. Despite it's size, the shell does just seem to be a mostly normal shell, meaning it represents an inordinate amount of calcium carbonate for us to use. The difficult part is extrag it.
Much like the other leviathan parts and corpses, it actually got caught a little ways from the shoreliself, requiring that we use small wooden boats to go out to break it down. No one wants to go out and do it, given how dangerous the waters currently appear to be. Ohe leviathan threat is ralized though, I expect we'll have an abundance of new resources to use. For now though, I o tinue oh to produg nitrogly to actually get us to that safe point, which sounds oxymoronie.
During the two days after pletion of the sodium hydroxide pnt, I had begun w on making glycerol from rendered fish fats, whearted to run into the problem that we'd pnned in advance for. An eagle arrived. Thankfully, the first one was fairly easy to manage. It found one of the ing sites up on the mountain, and after a few days, it had figured out where it could find food at our feeding area.
I tinued w on making gly, and found that I really o reduce the tration down to about 1/40th of the initial tration to properly process it. When all was said and done, we had about a 10% volumetric yield of glycerol, and a whole bunch of soap as the produbsp; Figuring that out took me a total of nine days from the start of the sodium hydroxide facility.
With that information, I then began the pns for the facility, which will vely be located not far from the sodium hydroxide pnt. This facility will render fish fat, and then produce the gly and soap we want from it. It's far more ve for everyone involved if we rehe fat as part of the process. All we o do is go around and collect waste fish fats t along for processing.
The glycerol and soap facility was, in some ways simpler, and in others, more plicated. I had our looms use steel wire to make us some metal meshes to use for filtering particutes out of the fats we render, so that the final soap products will be higher quality. Ultimately, the facility is mostly just rge metal taihat are heated and stirred to proceed with either rendering or reas. Fish are actually a fairly leaure, so the amount of fats we collect daily is actually quite small, even when we collect all the waste fats from our ey of a few thousand individuals.
It's still enough to make what we need, however. It only took 15 days to get this facility up and running, and in that time, a sed eagle arrived, and two more leviathan parts washed ashore. There was a small scuffle betweewo eagles, but ultimately, they both fouing points on top of the mountain, so we dodged a bullet on that one so far. One of the leviathan parts that washed ashore was the smaller of the two cws that went with a crab creature, while the other appeared to be the lower jaw and underbelly from a fish-like creature.
Iingly, the eagles have started to occasionally go out and pick at exposed meat ohan carcasses around the isnd. As long as they aren't attag the city, I'm happy. The dwarves seem to be taking it as a good sign for the future, but I'm not as optimistibsp; They're just sging a free meal. Depending on how things go with the nitrogly, we might end up agitating the eagles a bit too much with high explosives, and it could cause a casg problem. I'll hope for the best, but I've already talked with the military about designing anti-air grapeshot ons that use bck powder, based on my old steam on design. If the eagles go mad due to the explosions, we o be ready.
The produ of nitrogly was, by far, the most dangerous step, and the one I was least initially familiar with. I tinkered for twenty days before I started to get a handle on it. First I found that I o trate dowrid sulfuric acid to even higher purities. After that, I k was w due to the sheer number of acts I caused. I k was a sensitive explosive, but it's really something. I received multiple injuries due to rea chambers just exploding on me for reasons that initially eluded me.
It's very sensitive to shock, a, and just about any sort of minor act really. Manual stirring or adding ingredients was just too proo sudden failure. I'd slowly drip the glycerol in, only to add a little too much, and have the vessel overheat and explode. Ultimately, the trick was to do everything meically and slowly. For safety reasons, we'll be using many small rea vessels, rather than one big one, meaning the whole facility will o be quite rge with dividers betweeors so a single failure doesn't cause casg failures throughout the whole pce.
Ultimately, the nitrogly settles to the bottom of the rea chamber, and we have to carefully ralize the leftover acids. Figuring out how to safely wash the nitrogly and remove the acids with a weak base took another fifteen days and multiple explosions to figure out. Once I had some nitrogly though, I did try my hand at soaking paper in it, which did stabilize it siderably. There is still quite a bit of work to do to make the nitrogly at an industrial scale, but we're almost at the point where we start attempting to deal with leviathans.
