Chapter 186： Hearts of Iron One

Although it is approaching the end of the year, Paul Grayman does not intend to be idle.

After many discussions with the Government Affairs Council, he finally decided to attack the field of "heavy industry".

It is necessary to make a fortune before the situation of the civil war in the kingdom becomes clear. The king's army will go south to quell the chaos next spring. We must quickly win this potential big client. Heavenly Father blesses them to fight longer.

Papermaking, canned food, and ceramics are just small means used to solve the shortage of funds in the early stage. It is undeniable that inventions such as papermaking are of great significance to the course of history, but the real measurement of a country's hard power is the most important indicator for a long time Or steel production.

Even in the information age before time travel, steel production is an important reference data for comprehensive national strength.

Of course, iron production must be raised first, and only with this foundation can we increase steel production.

Before starting his "Iron Heart", Paul first had to do some research on the world's smelting technology. After communicating with Heman and other master blacksmiths, combined with some knowledge from his previous life, he had a relatively intuitive understanding of the current smelting technology.

Although Heman and other blacksmiths mastered the skills of making iron tools, they were also very familiar with how to make iron.

At present, the ironmaking technology adopted by countries all over the world is block ironmaking technology, and the specific process is as follows:

First build an iron-making furnace, then stuff iron ore and charcoal into the furnace and ignite it for roasting. In the case of insufficient oxygen supply, a large amount of hot carbon monoxide is produced, which takes away the oxygen in the iron ore {iron oxide}, and finally leaves It is the reduced solid wrought iron.

What is more troublesome is that since the solid wrought iron cannot be taken out through the furnace body, the iron-making furnace must be dismantled every time the iron-making is finished.

Moreover, the solid wrought iron taken out is only soft and loose sponge iron. Because it has not been melted, it still contains all the impurities in the iron ore, so it must be repeatedly forged to remove the pores and impurities before it can be used. metal material—iron ingot.

The process is quite troublesome. Paul sighed. It seems that by expanding the production scale, he cannot obtain the output he expected, and his territory is still relatively short of manpower. He must upgrade the current iron-making technology.

He planned to use a blast furnace to smelt iron, but after carefully combing through the relevant technology tree, he found that this thing could not be produced immediately.

First of all, in terms of fuel, the current fuel for ironmaking is mainly charcoal, but once large-scale production starts, using charcoal is a bit of a waste, and the cost is quite expensive.

A large number of trees were felled to make charcoal, which Paul did not want to see. Even leaving aside the environmental aspects - it's too early to talk about that - wood is also an important production material in many other industries.

Some people have tried to use coal—this fuel is only used in a few places at present—to replace charcoal, but the sulfur contained in the coal will cause the hot brittleness of pig iron, making it impossible to forge. This kind of iron is called sulfur iron. The strength is so weak that it cannot be used at all.

The only fuel that can replace charcoal and is cheap and sufficient is coke—coal after desulfurization has a high carbon content and is pure carbon. Although it still contains about 0.% to 1% sulfur, it is used for refining. Iron is still available.

In other words, he has to build coke production facilities first, and to produce coke, he has to increase the amount of coal mined. Although this thing has not been widely used all over the world, fortunately, Northwest Gulf has finally reached the forefront of the world this time. The use of coal as fuel has become popular here.

But even if the fuel problem is solved, it still faces the problem of insufficient wind power. Neither the traditional wooden blower nor the leather blower can meet the wind force requirements of coke combustion, because the gap of coke is much smaller than that of charcoal, so a higher wind speed must be used, which cannot be produced by existing blowers and manpower and animal power alone. Qualified and durable and stable wind speed.

Therefore, a piston blower has to be produced, and the power can be driven by a waterwheel at the current stage, so that coke can be barely used for ironmaking. Even so, it can only satisfy small ironmaking blast furnaces. For large blast furnaces, the wind power produced in this way is still too small. To meet the wind power requirements of large blast furnaces, we can only wait for the invention of the steam engine, which is a very distant thing.

Now we can only use small blast furnaces to smelt iron, step by step.

As for the more efficient blower and the matching hydraulic transmission system, I left it to the group of artificers recruited from the capital. He also started with a relatively simple one, and he already had a preliminary plan.

…

Within a few days, a coking crypt was built near a coal mine in Arda.

The coal dug out of the coal mine is directly sent here, waiting to be smelted into coke.

This is an open-air crypt. First, an earth pit with a depth of more than one meter and a diameter of about eight meters was manually dug on the ground, and the surrounding area was built with stones or soilThe depth of the pit is the same as the height of the masonry. Plus, the height is about 2.5 meters.

Dozens of workers are busy around the cellar.

They first built two layers of flue. The first layer of flue is made of lump coal in the center of the kiln, and coal is placed around the flue. The coal is pulverized coal. Install it to a certain height, step on the coal firmly, and then build the second layer of flue. The flues in this layer are more complicated than those in the first layer. There is a center around which there are 16 or 18 planar flues with a width of 0.67 meters and a height of 0.17 meters, each of which communicates with the center.

Then add coal for the second time, and cover all the flues with pulverized coal to a thickness of half a meter. At this time, start to ignite, ignite the easy-to-burn wood chips and throw them into the center flue and fall to the bottom flue, the coal burns, and the pulverized coal burns. When burning to the center flue of the second floor, put in wood chips to support the combustion.

Then came the third coal addition, still pulverized coal, with a thickness of 0.83 meters. During combustion, the central flue collapses, and the flame spits out from the small flue to the outside. The more it burns, the more it burns, and it will leak from the center to the outside.

When the fire is here, the workers are busy, running to surround the kiln with stones or brick fragments. When the flames came out of the bricks and there was blue smoke from the flames, it was a sign of scorching, and they were busy again. Some of the dozens of people immediately blocked the entrance of the cave, and some were busy blowing sand to cover it. After the sand was covered, Everyone was busy spraying water again.

After waiting for cooling, take it out, and the coking process is completed.

For the time being, Paul used a relatively primitive and simple method to produce coke, and it would not be too late to improve the process when he could really use it to produce other iron.

According to actual tests, the current cellar can produce two cellars per day, and the daily output of coke is one and a half tons.

Of course, after the official start of blast furnace ironmaking in the future, it will definitely continue to build more cellars, or directly use new production techniques.