The Ming Dynasty did not revolutionize

Chapter 13 Rubber Steel Machine Tools
On the second day when Zhu Jianxuan's laboratory became busy, the eunuch accompanying Zhu Jianxuan asked for the craftsman in charge of patents.

The relevant matters of patent application were also directly processed.

The application time for an invention patent is relatively long, often starting at more than a year.

Even if Zhu Jianxuan has a special identity and can definitely go through the fastest process, it will probably take several months.

After all, review and public announcement are required, and there are strict time requirements.

With someone specifically responsible for the task, Zhu Jianxuan and other craftsmen no longer have to keep a close eye on the work and can just focus on their own tasks.

For the next three days, Zhu Jianxuan led the craftsmen to develop plans and determine the subsequent practical experimental direction.

Three days later, several groups officially began to act separately and work on their respective tasks.

Zhu Jianxuan no longer watched them work all the time, but continued to write knowledge in his own lounge.

Every evening when the office was dismissed, I would ask them about their work progress.

Zhu Jianxuan would not become a craftsman, scientist or engineer himself.

Most of the time, I just provide direction and ideas, and that's enough.

Unless you have really plenty of time, you may only personally conduct some experimental work when you are bored.

What a monarch should consider is how to provide a better environment for scientific research and how to convert research results into income and combat effectiveness.

How to effectively use one's wealth and combat effectiveness to provide scientific research conditions and safety factors for one's country.

Instead of spending a lot of time to perfect some specific research.

Ten days later, three validation filter masks and a set of twelve filter modules were ready.

The finished product looks a bit like the gas masks used for military dogs during World War I.

The members of Experimental Group 4 also got formal jobs and began to conduct animal experiments using these filter masks.

Three sheep were given masks and locked together with three sheep without masks in a sealed room where sulfuric acid was heated.

The mist produced by the natural evaporation of sulfuric acid is mainly water vapor and a small amount of sulfur trioxide.

However, as the temperature rises and time increases, the concentration of sulfuric acid becomes higher and higher, and the sulfuric acid molecules will evaporate and float directly into the air.

Sulfuric acid vapor may damage the respiratory tract if inhaled.

At that time, chemical theory was still incomplete, but chemical craftsmen who studied acid had discovered that the mist produced by heating the acid could make them vomit blood.

After several days of experiments, the goats that were not wearing protective masks showed the expected symptoms.

But the goats wearing masks showed little reaction.

Once the craftsmen were sure that these masks could indeed protect animals, they immediately entered the human testing and application stage.

However, humans were not used to carry out the same sulfuric acid evaporation experiment.

Instead, they made a batch of protective masks for human use and asked experimenters to wear the masks to study the vulcanization reaction of natural rubber.

Heating sulfur and rubber is much less harmful than heating sulfuric acid.

Furthermore, these craftsmen themselves had originally studied various chemical materials such as acids on their own without any special protection.

Zhu Jianxuan first made them some protective masks that were really useful, and then asked them to get sulfur and rubber.

No one would have considered this before.

In their view, the new boss has taken their safety issues seriously and treats his subordinates like family.

What's more, he is a boss and a prince of noble status.

Being able to do this at the age of five shows that he is not only extremely intelligent, but also kind-hearted.

The craftsmen are more motivated to work.

Natural rubber is waterproof, elastic, insulating, and can be made into various shapes after being melted.

These properties have extremely high practical value. However, natural rubber has a big flaw, which is that it quickly becomes soft and sticky when exposed to heat or sunlight.

This resulted in natural rubber having very limited uses, mainly in making rain gear and pinball toys.

It was not until later that someone discovered that by simply adding appropriate amounts of sulfur and heating, the defects of natural rubber becoming soft and sticky when heated could be eliminated.

That is vulcanized rubber.

As a result, the application scope of rubber expanded rapidly.

Rubber products for daily and industrial use soon emerged, including insulating and waterproof rubber gloves and clothes, shoes, insulating sheaths for cables, inflatable tires and wear-resistant outer tires, sealing rubber rings for pipes and equipment, rubber and latex condoms, etc.

As a result, a new industry with huge market potential has been formed.

After Group 4 started working with the rubber, Zhu Jianxuan also assigned new tasks to Group 2 and Group 3.

Group 2 is responsible for exploring ways to improve steel smelting efficiency.

Zhu Jianxuan’s direction was combined iron and steel smelting, the key of which was to use steam engines for preheating blast and air blowing.

The Ming Dynasty already had blast furnace iron-making technology, and before the Chongzhen period, people had used coke to make iron.

The main problems with current ironmaking technology are low efficiency and high cost.

It takes nearly ten tons of coal to produce one ton of pig iron, and the heat utilization rate may be less than 5%.

Historically, the method to improve blast furnace efficiency was to use blasting, and the key was to change the conventional cold air into hot air.

When blowing cold air into the furnace, it is equivalent to heating and cooling at the same time, which not only wastes a lot of heat, but also lowers the overall upper limit of the furnace temperature.

Coal consumption can be reduced rapidly by simply using furnace fire to bake the blast pipes and heating the temperature of the air blown into the blast furnace.

According to historical experience, as long as the blown air is heated to above 120 degrees, the coal consumption for smelting each ton of pig iron can be reduced by half.

By designing a special sealed heating furnace and adding a steel grille that is kept red-hot at all times, the air temperature can be further increased and the coal consumption can be reduced by half.

By the end of the 19th century, only one and a half tons of coal were needed to smelt one ton of pig iron.

After the pig iron is initially refined, it must be further converted into steel before it can be more widely used in industrial production.

Steel and iron are essentially the same material. The huge difference in performance between the two is mainly caused by the carbon content.

Pig iron with the highest carbon content is brittle and hard, while wrought iron with a very low carbon content is soft and tough.

Steel is between pig iron and wrought iron, with some of the hardness of pig iron and some of the toughness of wrought iron.

Therefore, steel is suitable for making various weapons and tools.

After understanding the differences and reasons of such basic material properties, we can think of a very simple and crude steelmaking method:

Continue blowing air into the molten iron.

The oxygen in the air reacts with the carbon in the molten iron, burns under the high temperature of the molten iron itself, and turns into carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide that fly out.

You can get a furnace of molten steel or molten iron.

Therefore, in the process of combined steel smelting, the steelmaking process does not require fuel heating, but only requires a container for reaction.

This container is called an air converter.

The molten iron from the blast furnace is poured directly into the converter. After air is blown into the furnace to react, it is poured into a mold and becomes a steel ingot after cooling and solidification.

This principle is actually the same as the steel-frying method and can be regarded as an industrialized solution for the steel-frying method.

The most difficult part is controlling the blowing reaction time.

Because the reaction time is too long and the carbon content in the molten iron is too low, what is obtained is not steel, but soft wrought iron.

The new task of the three groups was to first refer to the existing large military hydraulic boring machines and manufacture similar large military boring machines driven by steam engines.

Small machine tools designed for the production of gun barrels, as well as relatively general industrial machine tools.

(End of this chapter)