It's kind of crazy how much the world is changing, and I can only imagine how much more others are feeling that sensation, though perhaps the demons actually don't notice it as much. For the dwarves, humans, and elves, who are quite used to relative stagnation for centuries, the amount that the world has changed must be mind boggling. For most of the demons, this pace is probably normal to them. The most recent break made me realize we've crossed the tipping point where others have started to be able to take over some of the development work I used to do, with more and more aspects being taken over every day.

Of course, I'm not saying that I'm not valuable. I've got deep wells of knowledge that are so distant to existing knowledge that it'll be a long time before I'm fully replaced. The difference being, however, that after we get fully functional aircraft, I'm hoping that I'll be able to designate others to handle those sorts of projects, and I can once again return to focusing on advancing science in new fields.

Aircraft development itself has been advancing in spurts, and in the first month of this new semester, we'd identified an issue. We're having an issue with reliable gaskets in the various operating conditions. We've been managing to make things work by using larger devices and metal gaskets in tight temperature tolerance ranges, but aircraft experience much wider conditions than tanks, ships, and stationary engines. What we need is a good rubber alternative.

While synthetic rubber wouldn't be impossible to make, and in fact, we could make a butadiene with a little effort already, but the quality of the produced material just wouldn't stand up to the conditions aircraft would experience. Without other additives or strict isomeric controls, the uses of the output material would be severely limited. If we could make even one additional additive, like styrene, we might actually be able to produce different copolymer ratios to allow for different functional uses.

The issue, as I've stated before, is that crude oil cracking is the main source that I know of for producing benzene, the more difficult precursor for styrene, the other of which is ethene. Organic chemistry already wasn't my strong suit, and trying to figure out a way to get benzene from messy organic sources sounds like a nightmare. There are exactly two methods I'm willing to try to make some amount of benzene before I say that it isn't worth my time to attempt.

For both attempts, I'm basically going to try to recreate hydrocarbon cracking from crude oil, but instead use heavy organics as the source, by heating and fractionating the initial heavy material, then steam crack the lighter portions. The first source option is to utilize one of my previous failures in making syngas before we switched to using processed charcoal. When I attempted to make syngas using just wood, we had a bunch of messy byproducts, including some tar substances. If I can recreate that process and tune it for producing tar, rather than syngas, we could then try to steam crack the tar into lighter hydrocarbons, and then fractionally distill out products, including benzene.

The second source I'd like to try is the waterproofing material from the mainland. I neglected looking into what exactly they were using for far too long, so I asked around. In the past, maybe traders would have kept it a secret, given our demand for it, but it's basically a processed tree residue, similar to the tar that I was just describing. However, they're quite particular about it, using only a particular species of tree in the northern part of the continent that grows in the shady side of valleys. Now, it could just be that the tree is easier to process, or it could be that it has even more heavy organics than average, which would actually make it a worse source for benzene, but it should be worth trying at least as a comparison.

Stolen story; please report.

On the plus side, if fractionation of our regular runny wood tar works well enough, even if nothing else comes of this, we'd still probably be able to produce our own durable waterproofing pitch. After I can make a comparison between the mainland waterproofing material yields of lighter oils versus our own wood tar source, it'll give me a better idea of what kinds of work I'll need to do for proper steam cracking. Depending on my initial results in the next month or so, I'll possibly recruit some of the researchers who are working on aircraft to help me optimize yields.

If we can get benzene in this way, we might also be able to crack the lighter fraction of gases to get the ethene as well. If this doesn't work, we're sort of out of luck for a while though. There is an alternative method for making these things in bulk, which involves utilizing methanol and zeolite catalysts to essentially produce crude oil distillates. The issue is that there are hundreds of zeolite catalysts since it's just a mix of silica and alumina produced in highly specific circumstances that determine their structure, and since exactly one of those zeolites is actually good as the catalyst for helping in that reaction, it'd be very difficult to find it.

If it was just making a bunch of mixes and testing them, I'd be down to grind it out, but some use organic molecules as seeds, others have specific pressure and temperature requirements, others still use rare elements in their production. All of which is to say that making most zeolites is really outside of our capabilities without more individuals trained in chemistry and organic chemistry. I don't recall which exact one was used, as it's been over six decades since I've even really thought about them, but I can say that it's unlikely to be a simple one, since it was a fairly modern invention for a catalyst on Earth. It's a whole team's decade long effort to develop zeolites for testing and determining what, if anything, an individual mixture is good at doing.

It was relatively simple to get the initial setup made to produce wood tar again. The hard part was actually fractionally separating it, given how flammable it is. What I will need to do is pull a vacuum on a distillation column before I heat it. As a test, I collected the gases that came off a sample of wood tar as I pulled it under a vacuum, and upon condensing them, I do believe there are some lighter hydrocarbons mixed together there that could be used to try to make ethene later. There are other pathways to ethene that I could follow though, so I'm not going to pursue it yet, given how the critical part is actually getting benzene.

With some of the lightest components removed from the wood tar, it became tackier and more viscous, which meant we had to apply some heat to it. Not so much as to decompose it, but enough to begin fractional distillation in a column. In theory, we could do what an oil refinery does, and collect liquids from each level of the distillation column, in that regard, we've essentially already pulled off the refinery gases in this batch version.

The wood tar is composed of far more heavy aromatic chains and polymers, rather than mostly long hydrocarbons, meaning the behavior would be a bit different in the column compared to crude oil. All I want is to collect the tops from the column until they start to get viscous and tacky again. At that point, I'd like to leave the heavy residue to be used for waterproofing tests. It won't be identical to asphalt or pitch, but it should be pretty heavy and tacky, possibly even solid at room temperature.

I will, unfortunately, need a column built for me to do these tests in. All of our existing columns have different design parameters than what I currently need. That's fine though, since a distillation column is really an integral part of chemical engineering. This column is a partial vacuum column under heat, but realistically, I'd like to design it to be useful for other future endeavors for distillation. As such, I'm having it installed in a new building at the academy, where it can form the beginning of a chemical engineering department. It's a bit odd to have a chemical engineering department before a proper chemistry one, but it'll sort of be covering both areas until a proper split can be made between pure chemistry and applied at scale chemistry.

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