Re: A bit of chemical engineering

Logan Kearsley wrote:
A whole planetary atmosphere is available if access to it is
convenient, but otherwise I'm only concerned about a container of gas.
Located on Venus- floating in the atmosphere, so as to have access to
close-to-Earthlike temperatures and pressures, but if it's easier to
do in a hotter, higher-pressure environment, that can be arranged.

The purpose is to figure out the easiest way to produce nitrogen as
lifting gas for a (preferably unmanned) balloon, and carbon monoxide
as additional lifting gas and fuel.

Hm. Freezing might still work, according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Venusatmosphere2.GIF you can get ambient temperatures down to -100 C but only around 0.01 bar of pressure. At least insulating your apparatus becomes easier with such a thin atmosphere around it.

If you're high enough in the atmosphere to be above the clouds you'll have access to a lot of solar power, assuming you can make light enough solar panels. Perhaps something electrolytic might work.

Oxygen is a lifting gas in Venus' atmosphere too so if you can make the balloon envelope out of something that resists oxidation well enough you might use that instead of or in addition to nitrogen. You wouldn't need to separate the nitrogen if you could just pull all the carbon out of a sample of air instead.
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