I started with a ship full of max-level veterans, and I'm just a complete noob.

Early the next morning, Da Liu carried the copper pipe and started working at the workbench.

The pipe was covered with a thick layer of verdigris. This was a discarded steam loop component that the boiler room replaced last week. Years of steam erosion had made the inside of the pipe wall very rough.

Jiang Ming reached deep into the pipe and felt around, confirming that there were no serious corrosion pits that could cause the pipe wall to perforate, only a layer of rather stubborn grayish-white hard scale.

Da Liu squatted down beside him, holding a worn-out wire brush, scraping off the limescale bit by bit along the pipe opening. The scraps fell into the enamel basin underneath, making a soft rustling sound.

"This stuff is too tightly packed. If it's not scraped clean, I'm afraid it will affect the purity of your ion exchange water column."

Da Liu picked up the enamel basin and shook it, saying with some helplessness, "But this work is really too time-consuming. I spent half an hour scraping it up to make just this small bowl."

About half a pound of grayish-white powder and fragments had accumulated at the bottom of the enamel basin.

Jiang Ming looked at the limescale in the basin and wanted to have Da Liu throw it directly into the trash can, but when his gaze swept over the grayish-white fragments, a set of chemical data about calcium ion titration suddenly flashed through his mind.

The boiler room uses untreated groundwater, and the scale formed by this water under high temperature conditions over the years is mainly composed of calcium carbonate with a very high purity.

This stuff is considered useless by ordinary people, but it can be very useful in chemical analysis.

"Da Liu, don't fall down yet."

Jiang Ming stopped Da Liu from emptying the limescale and pointed to the homemade instrument on the table used for testing conductivity, saying, "Put this scraped-off stuff into a clean, wide-mouthed glass bottle, seal it to prevent moisture, and then give it to Xiao Zhao."

"The sulfonated anthracite in this deionized water column will eventually reach adsorption saturation, and the water that flows out will no longer be pure water."

Seeing the puzzled looks on Lao Sun and Da Liu's faces, Jiang Ming continued to explain, "But how do we determine when it malfunctions? We can't wait until the vacuum tube breaks down before looking for the cause."

"After processing and acid dissolution, these calcium carbonates can be prepared into standard solutions with known calcium ion concentrations, which are then used to periodically calibrate the exchange capacity of water columns."

"If calcium ions are detected in the effluent, it means that the packing material is close to saturation and must be replaced in time."

After hearing this, Lao Sun slapped his thigh and immediately arranged for Da Liu to clean the glass bottles, while he himself carried the copper pipe and walked towards the lathe at the other end of the workshop.

Over the next two days, aside from the unwavering data recording, everyone in Workshop 1 devoted their energy to the renovation of the No. 2 deionized water column and the construction of the automated rinsing line.

Old Sun personally took charge, using a lathe to machine fine threads at both ends of the copper pipe, and then found thick steel plates to cut into perforated flange covers.

With the addition of high-temperature resistant fluororubber gaskets that Da Liu cut overnight, the entire sealing structure finally achieved complete watertightness.

The packing material was still loaded according to the standard procedure that Jiang Ming had previously figured out.

First, a thick layer of degreased cotton is laid as a barrier layer, followed by hardwood activated carbon that has been acid-washed with hydrochloric acid and rinsed with pure water until neutral.

Then, use another layer of degreased cotton as a partition, and finally fill it with sulfonated anthracite that has been boiled with sulfuric acid.

The internal volume of this copper tube is so large that the amount of filler material is almost twice that of the first glass column.

It took Old Sun a tremendous amount of effort to tighten and secure the upper flange cover, with the bolts and nuts making a sickening metallic scraping sound as they meshed.

After the new water column was connected for testing, the flow rate of the bottom outlet was much greater than that of the previous glass column, which was like a dripping glass, and the water flow was fine and continuous.

Xiao Zhao used a homemade conductivity meter to time the water test, and reported the data after ten minutes.

The second water column produced 450 milliliters of water per hour, while its conductivity remained stable near zero.

With the original glass column used as a backup, the workshop can now stably produce more than 600 milliliters of high-purity deionized water per hour.

This also completely eliminates the water quality bottleneck in the suspension preparation process before the large-scale trial production of Type B pipes.

While modifying the water column, Lao Sun was not idle. He directed Da Liu to remove a three-meter-long section of old steam pipe from the heating terminal that had been abandoned in the workshop for two years.

Old Sun's plan is full of engineering wisdom.

He welded a slanted bracket above the control panel using a triangular iron, and used it to support the pipe in mid-air, connecting one end to the excess steam that was regularly discharged from the factory's boiler room every day.

Hot steam flows through a pipe into a self-made serpentine condenser, where it is rapidly liquefied into distilled water surrounded by cold water. The water is then dripped directly into a copper deionized water column connected in series below.

After the secondary purification is completed, the water flows through the tubing into the sterile glass storage bottle on the table.

This rudimentary automated pure water rinsing line finally ran smoothly after 40 hours.

The scalding steam made a "whooshing" sound in the pipes, and after cooling, it turned into a continuous stream of crystal-clear water that slowly fell into the glass bottle.

Jiang Ming looked at the water purification equipment, which had a rugged industrial aesthetic, but did not urge the process to be completed.

His confidence came from the five rock-solid Type B improved tubes on the test stand behind him.

The 500-hour equipment-level life test has progressed smoothly to the 300-hour mark.

There were no heart-pounding anomalies on the curve; the pointers were as stable as if they were welded to the dial.

The reverse pulse system has been running on tubes B04 and B05 for nearly sixty hours.

The core temperature of the discarded radar trigger is always kept warm, and the microsecond-level negative sharp pulses output faithfully push impurity ions back into the depths of the grain boundary.

To test the limits of this maintenance scheme, Jiang Ming reduced the pulse frequency of tube B04 from once per minute to once every five minutes in the 280th hour, in order to test the rebound rate of impurity ions inside the coating.

After 20 hours of continuous observation, the current remained stable at 283.5 microamps, without any new fluctuations or drops.

This indicates that the impurity ions have been fully pushed back to their original positions, and subsequent maintenance cleaning can be carried out in a low-frequency mode, thereby significantly extending the service life of the pulse transformer.

Xiao Zhao calibrated the five filament ammeters on time, then used a standard resistance box to subtract the zero-point drift, and carefully recorded every piece of data.

The entire testing chain in Workshop No. 1 has finally entered the most tedious, yet reassuring, period of stable operation.

Taking advantage of the rare free time these past two days, Jiang Ming rewrote the 23-page process report he was preparing to submit to the ministry, adding revised pages.

He completely smoothed over the last remaining flaw in that defense.

He removed the cap from his pen and, on the materials and supplies list on page nineteen, crossed out the original label "triple distilled water" with a red line, then neatly changed it to "ion exchange purified water" in the next page.

Furthermore, he also provided detailed information in the appendix regarding the manufacturing process of the tiered packing material for deionized water columns, as well as a simple quality control method for calibrating exchange capacity using calcium carbonate from waste scale.

With this addition, the entire process finally became replicable enough to move beyond the laboratory and into mass production in the workshop.

Three hundred and twenty hours after the test began, the sky outside the workshop window had completely darkened, with only a few streetlights swaying slightly in the cold wind.

Xiao Zhao closed his old notebook and took out a brand new graph paper notebook, preparing to draw the curve coordinates for tomorrow.

As soon as he looked up, he saw the crew-cut clerk from the security department push open the iron door of the workshop and stride in.

The crew-cut clerk was wrapped in a military overcoat, clutching a folded piece of stationery tightly in his hand. The red official seal of the Chemical Analysis Laboratory of the Third Electronics Factory was stamped at the top of the paper.

"Engineer Jiang, the results of the composition analysis of the white powder at the bottom of the waste bin are in. Things are more complicated than we thought."

The crew-cut clerk handed over the report stamped with a red seal, his gaze sweeping over the still-running machines in the workshop, and he deliberately lowered his voice.