To open a coal mine in a place where there is nothing is absolutely very difficult. Pen, fun, and www.biquge.info

First of all, Dai Yan had to build a mine on the site of the vein, and this mine was still located under the military threat of the Chu State. In order to prevent the other side from sabotage, it was necessary to build a fortified fort.

However, no matter how strong the camp is, there is no guarantee that it will not be breached by the enemy, and those who can hold the camp in the end must rely on people with strong faith. This is also the reason why Dai Yan wants to share the benefits of coal mines and iron mines to the nobles of Xiangyi, after all, they will only really work hard if they protect their property!

Secondly, digging coal out of the ground is not an easy task. It seemed very easy to get coal in later generations, but it was based on advanced machinery. Even so, coal mine accidents are frequent. It can be said that coal is bought in exchange for human life!

Now Dai Yan does not have good machinery in his hands, and if he wants to mine coal, he must first drill a vertical shaft, and in order to prevent collapse, Dai Yan uses thick wooden planks to reinforce it.

After the vertical well is built, the interior of the well also needs to be carefully set up. There should be two main roadways inside the mine, one for the main road for the coal digging direction, and the other for ventilation. Since the coal mine needs to be transported internally, it is necessary to excavate an uphill or downhill along the slope of the coal seam and a trough parallel to the haulage roadway. After the groove was laid, the various roads and alleys with slopes were excavated, and the coal seams were separated from each other and could be mined.

Because there was no suitable machinery, coal mining in this era could only be mined little by little with pickaxes and mine hoes. This work is extremely hard, even if you recruit people from all over Xiangyi, I am afraid that there will not be many people among the common people who are willing to dig coal. So Dai Yan sent all the water bandits captured by the Juye Boat Division to this mine to forcibly dig coal!

Although these miners were defeated slaves, Dai Yan didn't want to treat them purely as consumables, but still wanted to give them a little human rights! Therefore, Dai Yan used the all-powerful bamboo of this era to insert it into the mine and use it as an exhaust pipe. In order to promote air circulation, he also specially developed exhaust fans and compressor fans, which not only make the miners feel bored when working underground, but also exhaust the gas in the mine, which can avoid the collapse of the mine caused by gas explosions!

Dai Yan also asked the disciples of the Mo family to set up a pulley set at the exit of the mine, so that the coal could be easily transported to the surface. As for transporting coal from the mine to Suishui, Dai Yan also referred to the coal mine trains that can be seen in later movies and even amusement parks.

Of course, this kind of "train" cannot be compared with the real train driven by steam engines or internal combustion engines in later generations. It is a wooden track, and then a special coal carriage is pulled by horses or donkeys on the track, transporting coal from the mine to the water's edge.

Later, for the sake of profit, Dai Yan felt that one of the horses and the donkey needed fine feed, and the other was too weak to pull the cart and was not economical, so he used a male donkey and a mare to cross to get a mule.

Although the mule is a strange creature that is infertile, and does not run as fast as a horse, it is not a picky eater compared to a horse, and can survive without being fed a fine diet. It eats less than a horse, but it has more strength and weight than a horse or a donkey, and the job of pulling a coal cart is simply perfect for it! After changing to a mule, the efficiency of the entire coal transportation has also been greatly improved!

The construction of train tracks, the production of numerous coal trains, and the breeding of mules were another huge investment.

The obtained raw coal, Dai Yan put it on the wharf by the Suishui for washing to remove some impurities in the raw coal. Although there was no environmental protection law in this era, Dai Yan would not have much of a problem even if he burned the raw coal directly, but considering that the cost of coal mining was not low, and he didn't want the pungent smell of sulfur dioxide to fill the entire Taoqiu in the future, he also added a coal washing process in this Xiangyi.

In this way, the obtained coal can be distributed according to its use.

If it is to be transported to Taoqiu, the coal needs to be transferred to the coal train again, and then the coal train is pulled directly from the dock to the ship, and then it is carried by the ship, and the coal is transported to Taoqiu with the car!

When the coal ship passes through Suishui, Surabaya and Heshui, it can reach the final destination Taoqiu. When they arrived at the wharf in Taoqiu, the coal train was also pulled down directly from the ship, and finally the coal was transferred to the coal yard in Taoqiu City through the track, and then the coal was transported to various coal shops in Taoqiu City by the people in the coal yard!

And the other part of the coal that is still left in Xiangyi will be used by Dai Yan to make iron directly!

Because there is also an iron mine near the coal mine in Xiangyi, the mining of iron ore is similar to that of coal mines, and the way of transportation is also completed by small trains, but the destination is different from that of coal.

These iron ores are absolutely poor iron ores, so if you want to get iron ore that can be smelted, you must also wash and beneficiate these raw ores.

Once you have the washed iron ore, you can crush it and use it for iron smelting.

Speaking of which, most of the composition of coal is carbon, and Dai Yan has coal and iron ore in his hands, so theoretically, he has no problem even if he directly uses the washed coal to make iron.

And he did! Before mass production, he asked the disciples of the Mo family to use coal directly to make iron in the laboratory, and the result was indeed to get the iron, but with a knife made of such iron to cut a piece of wood, the iron knife itself actually cut a gap!

"It seems that the idea of using coal directly to make iron is still unrealistic!" Dai Yan lamented in his heart.

Although the method of using coal directly to make iron has failed, this line of thinking is not problematic. Dai Yan then added another process to the iron-making, which is coking.

Coking is to isolate the air from the coal for high-temperature dry distillation, so that the coal can obtain solid coke, liquid coal tar and crude ammonia, and gaseous coal coke.

Under today's technical conditions, coke is considered to be the main target of Dai Yan in the product obtained from dry distillation of coal, and crude ammonia can be used to make nitrogen fertilizer with a little use. As for coal tar and coal coke gas, which are useful in later generations, Dai Yan could not use them, so he could only discard them directly.

As a result, coking by such a method will inevitably cause serious pollution to Xiangyi. And such a wasteful method will definitely be given the highest fine by the Environmental Protection Bureau in the future, and it may be possible to close the factory directly! However, the only environmental protection measures Dai Yan has taken for this coking are to choose the site downstream of Xiangyi, so that it does not pollute the drinking water in Xiangyi.

Dai Yan's approach is actually not new in later generations. Like the famous Rockefeller, before the invention of the automobile, the Standard Oil Company he founded monopolized 90% of the entire American oil refining industry, but he only needed kerosene in the products obtained from oil refining, and all the gasoline was directly discharged into the river water and thrown away!

Dai Yan did not use coal tar and coal coke gas, and he could only refer to the American tycoon's treatment of gasoline!

After obtaining the coke, Dai Yan built a shaft furnace with reference to the methods of copper smelting in this era and the experience of later generations. The shaft furnaces of this era are very similar to the small blast furnaces of later generations, both of which are fed from the top and blown from the bottom. Coke, crushed iron ore, and a certain amount of limestone are added to the charge at the top of the furnace, and a large amount of iron can be generated at the bottom of the furnace after a large amount of reduction reaction occurs in the entire shaft furnace!

In the added charge, coke is used as a reducing agent. Because limestone can react with the oxides of sulfur, phosphorus and silicon in iron ore, it can perfectly remove these harmful elements to iron, so that they can be precipitated as slag.

The biggest advantage of this shaft furnace ironmaking method is that it is continuous, as long as the charge is continuously added, the reaction in the blast furnace can be carried out continuously, so that a large amount of pig iron can be obtained!

Whether it was in this era or before the industrial revolution in later generations, people used charcoal as a reducing agent in iron smelting. As a result, whether it is in the East or the West, as long as iron is smelted, a large amount of forest must be cut down first, and then the logs must be distilled and hoarded enough charcoal before the blast furnace can be opened once, which is inevitably extremely inefficient!

And with the large amount of coke obtained from coking with coal, plus the almost endless supply of iron ore here, this blast furnace is constantly working day and night, and the continuous production of iron really amazes the people of Xiangyi!

With such a small blast furnace, the iron produced in one day reached 500 stones, which is roughly equivalent to about 3 tons in later generations. In the Celestial Empire in later generations, this kind of small blast furnace with an annual output of more than 1,000 tons, even in the poorest province, encountered such a backward device, and thought of it without hesitation!

However, in this day and age, such a small blast furnace is simply a miracle!

The nobles of Xiangyi originally had some complaints about Dai Yan's pollution of the local environment by opening a factory here, but when such a large-scale iron production came out, they had no complaints, and some only thanked Dai Yan!