Wang Luobin has purchased a complete set of small cement equipment for the production of cement by the vertical kiln method, but this equipment needs to use a large amount of coal to operate, and the traversers do not have coal for the time being.

Other cement raw materials, such as clay, lime, gypsum have been found locally, and the clay of this brick kiln has little sand content and the soil is reddish - high iron content, which is very suitable for burning cement. In the case of lime, although the calcium carbonate content of lime burned by the shell oyster house in Bopu is low, the chalk layer can also be found near the soil pit, and the gypsum has not been found nearby for the time being, but it is not a big problem to add gypsum or not.

After thinking about it again and again, Wang Luobin decided not to install a complete set of equipment with certain requirements for temperature and raw materials for the time being, but to fire a substitute cement to meet the current construction needs because of simplicity. This kind of cement is also called "artificial pozzolan cement", and some places have also burned in rural areas in the past. It does not require a complicated equipment process, simply put, it is to crush and grind the fired bricks or pottery, or it can directly put the lime and clay in the kiln for calcination. The process of this cement substitute is very simple, and the calcination temperature of 600-800 degrees Celsius can be used, which is much lower than the 1450 degrees Celsius required to fire Portland cement. The performance is roughly similar to that of the oldest "pozzolana cement". The Yunnan-Vietnam Railway in Yunnan was built with this kind of cement, and it was widely used in infrastructure construction in the rear of the southwest during the Anti-Japanese War.

Wang Luobin just knows that there is this thing, and he doesn't know if it can be used. So first ask someone to take a batch of red bricks from the brick yard and come over for experiments. The laborers smashed the bricks into small pieces by hand, and the grinding work was originally intended to be pulled by hand or horsepower - they found a lot of large and small stone mills in the quarries of Bairentan - and after an hour of operation, they found that the efficiency was really low: only 10 kilograms were crushed.

After grinding and sifting, Wang Luobin mixed the powder with lime, then mixed it with water, and the mixture was used to build a wall in full view of the construction team. Everyone was very excited and wanted to see for themselves whether this legendary cement substitute really worked.

After drying, it proved that this kind of burnt clay substitute cement was fully usable. Of course, it can't be compared with real Portland cement, but it can be used as a binder for building materials, and even concrete with little strength requirements.

This discovery excites everyone. Even Zhao Wu, a plasterer who smashed bricks, had an excited look on his face -- he had been a plasterer for more than ten years, building walls and houses, and mixing loess, lime and water to make glue. The most exquisite thing is nothing more than the plaster with glutinous rice juice, and this group of people actually made a plaster that can firmly bond the bricks together by grinding the flour with bricks! This is beyond his imagination, are they really pirates? This trick has to be remembered. Because I learned this hand, I was even a little happy that I was captured.

Cement is the first modern industrial product in the true sense of the word, although it is not yet too qualified. But this is a crucial step for the construction of the traverser, and cement is the basic raw material for modern construction.

However, the efficiency of grinding is still too low, and at this level, the output of 24-hour continuous grinding is only 240 kilograms, which is not worth mentioning.

After researching by the mechanics, they were able to build a simple automatic mill. They used two stone mills found from the Bairentan quarry to make an electric double mill, which was connected to the vertical shaft with a piercing mandrel, and the vertical shaft was equipped with a bearing to reduce the resistance when rotating, and a rocking frame with a throwing wheel drove the bevel gear through an iron chain to make the stone mill run.

However, the feeding and sieving materials are still manual operations, which are not only inefficient, but also easy to cause pneumoconiosis - this is a very troublesome occupational disease, and it is almost impossible to save it. Although the people who did the work were captive natives, labor was also an asset to the traverser. Zhan Wuya took a few mechanical crew members to study it, added a wooden wheel to the bevel gear, and used a belt to drive a windmill for sieving grain, the material was added by the funnel at the top of the vertical shaft, and the powder rolled out automatically flowed down from the ramp and fell into the windmill, and the coarse particles were separated by the wind, and the coarse grains were sent back to the funnel above the stone mill by the conveying hopper next to the ramp, and then entered the mill again. This iron-wood-stone co-construction plant can crush almost 1 ton of broken bricks per day.

With cement, refractory bricks are also needed for masonry wheel kilns. Refractory bricks are one of the cornerstones of modern industry, without this thing, not to mention wheel kilns, cement kilns, even the future blast furnace has no hope. Fortunately, Lingao produces refractory materials locally. The traversers found alumina and silicon oxide from the vicinity of the brick kiln to burn the refractory bricks, and the refractory bricks were easily fired.

With refractory bricks and cement, the construction team was able to build a wheel kiln, and a few days later, for the first time, the brick-red chimney of the wheel kiln spewed thick black smoke into the air.

"Damn, it's beautiful." Someone was muttering. The eyes of the traversers showed an intoxicated look, which was disgusted by everyone in the past, symbolizing backwardness and pollution, but now it is regarded as the most beautiful thing by the traversers, Wang Luobin looked at the smoke, and somewhat understood that the great leaders of Weishenme did not attach importance to the ancient city wall of Beijing at all, and they said that they would be demolished. However, the rhetoric that "Beijing's chimneys should be as dense as a forest" was uttered -- the ancient city wall was something too familiar to the Chinese at that time, and the scarce modern industry at that time was a sign of a country's social progress.

At this time, the brick-red chimney of this wheel kiln stands proudly in the green mountains and green waters on the bank of the Wenlan River, without any sense of disobedience for the traverser, announcing the official beginning of the industrial era of the traverser.

The kiln should be warmed before the kiln is fired, and the construction team set off to Bopu to build a wood drying kiln for the wood processing factory, with this standard drying kiln, the wood team will continue to provide qualified wood products to the construction site of Bairencheng, instead of the temporary substitute wood that will dry and shrink at any time with different humidity from the earthen kiln. Wang Luobin didn't participate in this matter, drying the size of the kiln materials, anyway, Luo Duo would go to find books, and he hadn't seen this thing when he lived in Guangxi.

Watching the construction team climb into the agricultural vehicle and drive towards Bopu, he suddenly remembered something, and immediately dialed a phone call to Mei Wan: "You discuss with the people in the timber group to build another wood dry distillation kiln." ”

"Distillation kiln?" Mei Wan didn't know what it was.

"It's a charcoal-burning kiln, and you'll tell Luo Duo in a moment that he knows. You guys should study it first and see when it will be able to go into production. ”

Since there is no coal, it is only replaced by charcoal. Dry distillation of wood yields not only charcoal, but also wood tar, which is used as a chemical raw material, which is a complex compound that can extract many useful substances. The calorific value of charcoal itself is not inferior to that of coal.

The catering office uses a cooking truck to deliver food to the workers working in the brick factory. Now, Ude has taught them to line up by sticking. Queuing is a basic social order, a manifestation of everyone's fair access to resources, and the reason why Chinese don't like queuing seems to have nothing to do with personal qualities. Perhaps it is largely related to the long-term lack of social resources, and whoever follows the order will suffer, so over time, everyone does not like to queue up, and when there is a chance, they will rush and squeeze others behind. Ude felt that there was some truth in this.

Just like the current meal, although each team has a captain to maintain order, the whole team is still a bit chaotic, and everyone wants to be at the front. It was only because of the coercion of the traverser that the order of the team was barely preserved.

Wu De was satisfied with the work of his laborers, and throughout the construction period, he seemed to just walk around, walk around, and observe the team. Most people still work hard, of course, not because of their high consciousness, but because of the sense of competition between the five captains, and no one wants their team to perform too badly in front of Wu De - for the common people, it is always "traitors are worse than devils", these five captains are indeed very hard at supervising the work, but this is not enough. Wude knew that the captives were working hard only out of fear, and that it would take other incentives to work voluntarily.

Wu De decided to start with food. After each of the captives had received a bowl of porridge, Wude had a basket bringed. This strangely shaped thing made up of mechanical equipment emits a fishy smell of dried seafood. It is a salted fish work that is not successful in the food office......

"Today is Wang Tian's team doing the best and the most," Wu De announced on the mound, "so each of them can eat one more salted fish." ”

This added bonus makes many people's eyelids puff up. From the time they were captured, they ate two meals of porridge a day -- which was quite sustainable for most people -- and there were many people who lived a half-starved life since they were born, but they didn't even have a salted radish or anything like that, and they drank porridge and urinated a lot, and they couldn't eat salt, and their bodies were weak after two days.

"Wang Tian commanded effectively, and sent two." This reward made Wang Tian's face glow with excitement, and the other four people felt a little sour. Eating more salted fish is a trivial matter, but losing face is a major matter. They are all thinking about cleaning up a few foreign workers at night - killing chickens and making an example of monkeys.