Eighth year of Chongzhen

Chapter 677 Improvement of Blast Furnace Steelmaking Process

In Zhu Youjian's plan, Guozijian will be renamed Daming Institute of Technology in the future.

Just by listening to the name, one can know the future development direction of this university.

The talents brought back by Fang Yizhi and the others will be the first batch of professors of the Polytechnic University. From now on, the Polytechnic Institute will continue to recruit talents from all over the world, striving to build it into the world's top-notch institute of science and engineering.

As long as every introduced talent has decent academic achievements, he and his family will enjoy super material treatment, and the imperial court will provide a large amount of funds for them to use as research funds.

Although Europe has begun to pay attention to the cultivation and introduction of talents, the current material foundation of various countries cannot be compared with Ming Dynasty.

For example, for example, Descartes, the founder of modern science recognized by later generations, was a great man who founded analytic geometry. He was in a state of homelessness all his life, and he was never married because of long-term residence.

If the founders of this kind of modern science can have a stable and comfortable environment for them to conduct scientific research, maybe a new situation will emerge in advance of the development of modern science.

As long as Descartes can be introduced to Daming, Zhu Youjian will provide him with the best material conditions in all aspects, including finding him a wise and virtuous woman from Daming as his wife.

But the premise is that he must become a citizen of Ming Dynasty and become a glorious citizen of Ming Dynasty.

As for Descartes' belief, isn't he a Catholic?
It's just a Catholic church in the huge capital, what a big deal?
Compatibility is one of the important reasons why Chinese civilization has always been ahead of the world. If even a Catholic cannot be tolerated, how can we lead the world trend and direction?
What's more, a scientist with excellent genes like Descartes is just a believer, and he doesn't have the desire and ability to preach. As long as he can go to church and ask his God secretly when he encounters confusion, say Maybe he will have a burst of inspiration when he comes back, and maybe he will come up with a shocking work right away.

Even if there will be so-called priests and priests who will come to the church in the future, just like the Buddhist abbot, they will stay there for a long time, and try to recruit believers in the capital to spread their ideas, but the result will most likely disappoint them.

Because this is Daming.

The assimilation ability of Chinese civilization is unparalleled in the world.

In this land where the three religions of Confucianism, Buddhism and Taoism have coexisted for thousands of years, no matter what religion you are from outside, all of them will be changed in the end so that you don’t even recognize God Jesus.

This point can be concluded from the experience of Matteo Ricci, Tang Ruowang and others.

These two Holy Roman Empire Jesuit missionaries have settled in China for decades and were allowed to build several churches to preach, but after these decades, there are very few believers.

This means that they are faithful to their beliefs, and their will is very firm, otherwise they would have collapsed long ago.

Zhu Youjian does not oppose any personal beliefs.

As long as your beliefs do not pose a danger to society, then you can believe in whatever you like, even if you offer a pile of cow dung at home and offer incense and kowtow every day, no one will care about you.

Now Daming's scientific foundation is too weak, there must be epoch-making figures to open up the situation, and then a large group of high, middle and low-level talents will teach by example, and the native students of Ming will learn from it, and then after several generations of accumulation, Daming's scientific talent It will slowly get on the right track.

Zhu Youjian's task is to lay a solid foundation for the development of Daming, make the future Daming the most advanced country in the world, attract top talents from various industries in the world to come and settle, and make Daming household registration the envy of people in other countries. A status symbol.

By next year, Zhu Youjian plans to abolish the Ming Dynasty's curfew system, allowing people living in the city to go to the streets at night, and qualified merchants and vendors can set up stalls to guide everyone's consumption.

Let's try it out in the capital this summer.

Zhu Youjian has long been yearning for the prosperous and noisy nightlife in the Song Dynasty in history, and he really wants to experience what kind of feeling that environment can bring.

Daming already has that kind of condition now, there is no need to worry about safety issues anymore, the consumer group is also ready-made, and the merchants will naturally respond positively. Now it can be said that everything is ready and only owes Dongfeng.

Thinking of Descartes, Zhu Youjian couldn't help thinking of Song Yingxing.

Now Song Yingxing has resigned from his position as the Shaoqing of Sinong Temple, and with the title of minister of the Ministry of Industry, he leads some literati who are interested in scientific research, busy all day in an area designated by the Imperial College, studying all kinds of weird things , the required expenses were specially allocated by Zhu Youjian from internal funds.

Not to mention, this group of people really didn't waste a lot of money in vain. In the second half of the 11th year of Chongzhen, it was thanks to the efforts of Song Yingxing and his group that the Smelting Department of the Jiangzuo Bureau located in Tianjin Wei made a lot of money in steelmaking. made a major breakthrough.

After countless experiments, Song Yingxing discovered that the very low output of Daming Steel was directly related to the low temperature of the blast furnace.

So how to increase the furnace temperature?

After repeated experiments, the team headed by Song Yingxing modified the existing smelting process from three aspects.

The first is to change the fuel from coal to coke.

Coke has existed in China since ancient times, and the smelting technique has been preserved.With the end of the war, big households in Shanxi and Datong Prefecture built blast furnaces and began to smelt coke, which was then shipped to the capital for sale.

The calorie content of coke is much higher than that of coal, which can bring more sufficient combustion value to ironmaking. Since the conversion of coal to coke, the quality of molten iron produced has been significantly improved, and the amount of refined iron has also increased significantly. improvement.

Secondly, increase the height of the ironmaking blast furnace to further increase the combustion value of coke.

The effect of this improvement is also effective, but in the eyes of Song Yingxing and others, it seems that it is not perfect now.

Finally, someone raised the issue of the inlet air temperature of the kiln, which immediately attracted everyone's attention.

Existing iron-making blast furnaces also use a blower to continuously blow air into the blast furnace to increase the oxygen content in the furnace and make the fuel burn more fully.

But here is a detail that everyone has ignored, that is, the wind sent by the blower is cool, which makes the furnace temperature lowered invisibly.

Since someone raised this question, let's find a way to modify it and try to see the result.

Therefore, on the way the blower blows air into the blast furnace, a short masonry channel is built, and coke is also burned in the channel, so that the air blown by the blower is sent into the blast furnace after a short period of rapid heating, transporting Oxygen changes from cold wind to hot wind.

After these three transformations, the impurities in the molten iron melted from iron ore have been significantly reduced, and the output and quality of the refined steel produced have been greatly improved.

(End of this chapter)