national surname chiming

Chapter 152 One step at a time until the eve of industrial song's life

Song Yingxing and his party settled down in Daye County, adapted to the environment, and started working slowly.

With the support of Shen Daotai, craftsmen were recruited everywhere and talents from all walks of life were recruited.

With sufficient financial support, he can also buy what he lacks without hesitation, and gradually build up the laboratory and research team.

These things are so intricate, I have been busy for half a month without knowing it, and the time has quietly come to the end of the twelfth lunar month, and the Chinese New Year will be in less than ten days.

Although busy, the results are very gratifying. At least the structural verification of the first batch of improved blast furnaces has passed.

The refractory brick materials used may be iteratively optimized, but the high temperature resistance of the semi-finished samples currently under development has also increased by about one or two hundred degrees compared with the original blast furnace bricks.

The process of coal coking has also run through in an orderly manner. Originally relying on the experience of the testers to adjust the air intake during coking, it has now been upgraded to rely on the valve structure and operating procedures of the furnace itself to control the air supply. capacity.

For this reason, the craftsmen also created the first professional coking oven that can work stably.In the future, while improving and expanding production, it seems that the situation is very good.

On the 21st day of the twelfth lunar month, Shen Shuren got acquainted with Song Yingxing and Song Mingde's uncle and nephew, saying that it was the acceptance date for the new experimental blast furnace to be opened and tapped.

Shen Shuren was also very excited, and went to the iron factory early in the morning to observe the actual effect carefully.

He personally supervised the farming of the military industry in Wuchang Prefecture. After almost two months, he finally had the first batch of solid results.

When we arrived at the ironworks, we could see a new blast furnace at least seven or eight feet taller than the old blast furnace from a distance, standing tall and majestically.

If the subsequent refractory brick material formula is further upgraded, and the compressive strength at high temperature at the bottom of the furnace wall is further improved, then this blast furnace still has the potential to continue to increase.

The higher the blast furnace, it means a more sufficient degree of reaction and higher production efficiency and product quality.

Of course, in addition to being taller, more resistant to high temperatures, and changing fuel, this blast furnace has other small new designs.

For example, the ancient Chinese civilization did not pay much attention to air intake preheating during blast furnace metallurgy.As a result, when making iron, the temperature in the furnace can never rise too high.

Although Shen Shuren doesn't understand technology, he also roughly knows the direction of his efforts. After all, he read a lot in his previous life, so he explained it to Song Yingxing a while ago.

Song Yingxing is also very capable of execution, and solved this problem in less than ten days, and even iterated two or three times——

Initially, Song Yingxing thought of adding a preheating chamber directly in front of the furnace inlet, warming the fire outside the chamber, and adding the air that was about to enter the furnace to a certain temperature.

However, the thermal conductivity of the furnace itself is too poor, and the thermal conductivity of the air itself is even worse. It is heated through a layer of furnace wall, the efficiency is too low, and it is a waste of fuel.

Later, Song Yingxing thought of using the exhaust gas that had been burned to collect it at the exhaust port, and pass it back to the outer layer of the air intake port to create a double-layer pipe.The inner layer is fresh air with high oxygen content, and the outer layer is already hot exhaust gas, trying to transfer the waste heat of the exhaust gas to the fresh air, so as to save fuel.

But this trick still only solves the problem of fuel waste, and does not solve the pain point of low thermal conductivity.

Fortunately, Song Yingxing is smart, experienced, and able to inspire each other with Shen Shuren. The two worked together to come up with the third version - the preheating chamber that isolates the exhaust gas and fresh air is directly changed from refractory bricks to iron. Tube.

The heat exchange efficiency of metal pipes is of course much stronger than that of masonry. In this way, the efficiency of heat transfer from exhaust gas to fresh air is greatly improved.

Although it is still not high enough, it is much stronger than before.Song Yingxing said at the time that if he was still not satisfied, he could only use copper pipes instead of cast iron pipes——

Everyone on earth knows that copper is a metal with very good thermal conductivity, much better than iron. Among all the metals in the world, only gold and silver have better thermal conductivity than copper.

But copper is also much more expensive than iron. It is possible to experimentally build a few copper tubes for heat exchange experiments, or to produce high-end special steel in the future, you can use a small amount of copper tubes to preheat the blast stove.The large-scale production of Shen Shuren is still somewhat reluctant, and it cannot be afforded.

Fortunately, after Song Yingxing proposed the idea of ​​copper pipes, it also inspired Shen Shuren, making him think of water heaters in later generations.

For the sake of heat exchange efficiency, the gas water heaters of later generations use curved copper pipes to carry tap water, and let the gas flames burn the copper pipes to boil water quickly?

After all, Shen Shuren is a man, a high-achieving student, even if he is not a science student, he still took it apart to see if the water heater in his previous life was broken.Inspired by this idea, he quickly realized: the thermal conductivity of the material is not good enough, so can the heat exchange be improved by increasing the surface area!

Even if we just use the cheapest cast iron pipes for air heat exchange, we can also change the mold of the cast iron pipes and directly make the inner and outer walls of the pipes have many raised fins, which would be the same as the radiators on CPUs of later generations of computers. It's structured!
And anyway, cast iron things are formed in one shot, as long as the mold is opened, the complex shape will not increase the processing difficulty in mass production.

He did what he said, and this is how the preheating air chamber of the blast furnace in front of him today is. If the outer wall of the preheating air chamber of this blast furnace is removed, you can see the internal heat exchange iron pipes, which are similar to hedgehogs. There are also dense cooling fins.

Originally, according to the CPU radiator of later generations, the bottom and top of the cooling fins should be the same width, so that the surface area can be maximized under the condition of unit radiator weight.

However, the casting mold opening process in the late Ming Dynasty was obviously not so precise, and it could not cast very long iron tubes with thin fins. Therefore, in fact, the heat exchange tube fins used by Shen Shuren's blast furnace were thick at the bottom and narrow at the top. The cross-section is almost the same as that of a gear.

It is nothing more than dense long rows of sharp teeth on the inner and outer walls, which looks very scary.

At that time, Song Yingxing was amazed when he heard this idea for the first time, and shouted to be educated, saying that he had spent his whole life pondering on crafty things, and had also delved into the problem of heat exchange, but why didn't he think of increasing the contact area of ​​heat conduction by this way.

……

During this period of time, there were still many details of the arduous research and development process. Shen Shuren was distracted for a while, but he couldn't recall them one by one.

Soon, the sound of the blast furnace opening to tap iron brought him back from his memories. Amid the exclamation of others, he also quickly focused on the ironworkers who were operating.

After some tedious tapping operations, a batch of freshly baked iron materials were also shipped out. The craftsmen were sweating profusely. Even in the middle of winter and wearing protective clothing, it was extremely hot.

Once the blast furnace is started, as long as there are no special circumstances, the furnace will not be shut down, so even when the iron is being tapped, it is still heating continuously.

Feeding at the upper furnace mouth, iron tapping at the bottom, cyclical reaction.Each batch of input material has to stay in the furnace for a long time, reacts and sinks step by step, and finally discharges the material from the bottom.

Shen Shuren was also very nervous and curious about the result. He actually waited for a while. After about a cup of tea, Song Mingde came to report with joy, saying that this furnace yielded 2000 catties of iron at one time, which was more than the original [-] catties. The production capacity of primary iron has more than doubled.

When Shen Shuren heard this number, he was quite excited at first, but then he was relieved.

After all, it is normal to use coke to speed up the reaction efficiency, preheat the air to increase the furnace temperature, and use refractory bricks to increase the height of the furnace body. The three-pronged approach is actually normal.

Originally, this was ironmaking technology in the 1640s. Considering the stagnation of technology in the last hundred years of the Ming Dynasty (many technologies in the Ming Dynasty basically stagnated after Jiajing, and there were still improvements before), this is actually quite It was at the level between 1550 and 1600 in Europe.

After using the idea of ​​coke ironmaking, it is equivalent to a one-time progress to the modern blast furnace invented in the Netherlands in 1707.

Moreover, the Dutch blast furnace in 1707 in history did not have such an innovative idea of ​​"radiating fins preheating air ducts".Shen Shuren and Song Yingxing opened three small hangings at once this time. The level of smelting technology is at least one generation more advanced than that in 1707.

He estimates that it can be roughly equivalent to Western technology in the 1770s and 1780s, that is, on the eve of the industrial revolution—Watt was a steam engine improved in 1787. Before the steam engine appeared, the progress of European metallurgical technology in the past seven or eighty years was still relatively Slowly, just make some minor improvements.

This means that Shen Shuren's current level of iron and steel smelting is roughly equivalent to the level in history on the eve of the independence of the United States or the death of France.

With these cast steel cannons, the level of craftsmanship that can be achieved can theoretically be compared with the cannons at the beginning of the Napoleonic Wars.

(Note: It is still incomparable with the weapons in the late period of Napoleon. Napoleon fought for more than 20 years, which happened to be more than 20 years after the invention of the steam engine, so the military technology progressed rapidly at that time. In 1790, Napoleon just joined the war, and in 1815 When he was kicked out, the weapons were not of the same generation. Shen Shuren didn’t invent the steam engine, so he could only compare it with the technology when the war started in 1790)

If this is compared with the "European Universalis" series, it is like that Ming used the artillery of level 12 technology in "Europe" before Westernization, while the Dutch were using level 15 technology at the same time.

Once Shen Shuren is linked, he can directly catch up to the ultimate 18th level technology in Europa Universalis, the level of Napoleon's artillery.For example, the latest artillery that the Europeans are using in the 1618-164830 war is still ahead of the third level of technology.

Of course, the premise is that the mechanical structure design and machining process of Shen Shuren's future guns must also keep up.All he is doing so far is to ensure that the shortcomings of material technology are solved, and machining technology is a problem in another field.

Shen Shuren fancied intensely while waiting for the result of the quality inspection.

The increase in production can be seen instantly by counting with the naked eye, but the improvement in quality requires time for laboratory testing—mainly taking the materials for various strength tests, it will take some time.

Shen Shuren was a little anxious, so he asked someone to pour a few cups of tea, he drank two full pots, and went to the toilet twice, finally there was a result.

"My lord! Great joy! The new iron smelted with coke is indeed much denser. If it is used to smelt cast iron and cast directly, it may not have as many blisters and voids as before. If it is cast iron, or in Carburized steel, the texture is definitely much better than the current one!"

After both Song Mingde and Song Yingxing confirmed the quality inspection results, they were overjoyed. This is also the result of their many days of hard work, so they naturally cherish it.

(End of this chapter)