"How can a paddle wheel be more efficient than a propeller?"

In the winter of the nineteenth year of Chengtian, snowflakes have fallen on the other side of the Yangtze River. Chen Ming's whole body seemed to be burned by a nameless anger.

it!

Was it an insult to his IQ that someone from the steamship research team had sent him such a report for the second time?

Will a paddle steamer go faster than a propeller boat?

Emperor Chen has lived two lifetimes, and he is in his fifties, and he has heard of it for the first time.

Yes, the work of the steamship research group under the Zhongshan Academy of Natural Sciences in China has entered a very critical and critical stage, but at this stage, which was originally not a problem, their progress has been stopped. And it was His Majesty the Emperor, who had always been very supportive of the Academy of Natural Sciences, who stopped them.

After the first report was rejected, the steamship research team studied and re-studied the propeller, tested and tested, and finally could not find a reason to abandon the paddle wheel and choose the propeller. So they made a second report to Chen Ming.

……

In 1690, Denis Baban of France proposed the idea of using a steam engine as a power to propel ships, but there was no practical steam engine at that time, so the idea could not be realized.

Seventy-nine years later, in 1769, the French inventor Joffrey loaded the steam engine onto the ship. However, the steam engine was rudimentary and cumbersome, and it was driven by a set of ordinary wooden oars, and its speed was very slow, which failed to show the superiority of a motor ship.

In 1783, Joffrey built the world's first steamship, the Poroscafi, but after 30 minutes of sailing, the ship's steam boiler exploded.

Then, seven years later, in 1790 in the United States, John Fitch used a steam engine to drive the oars to paddle water, which was extremely inefficient, and Fitch's invention was not taken seriously.

If it is the original history, it will have to wait another 12 years, the Englishman William Simmington used Watt's improved steam mechanism to cause the world's first steam-powered paddle steamer, the Charlotte Dundas, to be launched in Scotland's Foss-Clyde Canal, and the sea trials were successful. It was a 30-foot-long wooden-hulled ship with a Westington-designed steam engine in the center that propelled a tail paddle wheel. The appearance of the steamer was a blow to the tugboat owners, who desperately opposed it on the grounds that the steamer produced large waves. The first steamboat was strangled in the cradle.

After another five years, Fulton, the 'father of steamships', was born.

But in today's time and space, in Chen Ming's era, Fulton still has a cool side and a rest.

With Chen Ming's guidance, the two revolutionary means of transportation, ships and trains, have already been studied by the Zhongshan Academy of Natural Sciences more than ten years ago.

At the beginning, due to the kinetic energy of the steam engine, the performance of the samples produced by the two research groups was very poor and not practical. But now, the steam engine of today has been greatly improved and improved compared to the steam engine of twenty years ago.

But Chen Ming didn't believe the data in the report that the steamship research team gave him on the ground.

Paddle wheels can reach speeds of up to 8 knots/h, while propellers have speeds of 4 knots/h.

These two numbers are reversed, and the next one is acceptable to Chen Ming.

However, the report of the study group clearly states who is the fourth section and who is the eighth section.

And there is also a side interpretation, the propeller has three windmill blades, forged, compared with ordinary windmills, it increases the radial width of the blades, in order to choose a better match between the pitch and the speed in the experiment, the propeller blades are made into a structure that the pitch can be adjusted. During a month's test voyage on the river, the propeller changed several pitch values, but the results of the experiment were not satisfactory, and the performance was far inferior to that of the paddle wheel. This experiment proves that under the existing steam maneuvering energy, under such low speed conditions, the superiority of the paddle wheel can be fully exerted, and its propulsion efficiency is higher than that of the propeller.

The world did not come after the invention of the steamship that the propeller was born.

The ancient Chinese wheel, the so-called "paddle wheel" in Europe, combined with the modern steam engine, installed a row of recto-blade plates of the original paddle wheel obliquely on a hub, which can form the prototype of the propeller.

The windmill is a utensil, which can output torque when it rotates with the wind, and conversely, in the water, the input torque rotates the windmill, and the windmill in the water may propel the boat to move.

And the Archimedes screw pump of ancient Greece, which has been used for more than ten centuries in Europe, can lift water horizontally or vertically, and the fact that the spiral structure can pump water has long been known to Europeans.

In the present era, in 1752 of the Western calendar, the Swiss Bernoulli first reported that the propeller was superior to the various thrusters that existed before it, and he designed the propeller with a double lead spiral. In 1764, still a Swiss, the mathematician Euler studied other thrusters that could replace sails, such as paddle wheels (paddle wheels), including propellers.

Therefore, the invention of the propeller is different from the situation in Chen Ming's memory. I don't know if Chen Ming's memory is confused, or if there is confusion in that. Regarding the invention of the propeller, Chen Ming remembers the most vivid scene of a child, Fulton, the inventor of the steamship, sitting in a very small boat, with his legs hanging down in the water and making a splash......

Perhaps his memory was really confused.

Anyway, after the European Office sent back the propeller-related matters, Chen Ming's eyes widened.

And now the members of the steamship research group are distressed, what they say is obviously true, why doesn't the emperor believe it? Look, the report came back again, saying that we should continue to improve the propeller, adjust the pitch value of the propeller, adjust the overall structure of the propeller, and adjust the inclination angle of the blade......

Anyway, many members of the research group want to drop their heads.

Emperor Lao Tzu is in trouble with the propeller, isn't he?

While forging a propeller wasn't a difficult task for the research team, something had been holding them back for months, and it was really annoying to see it now.

......A short whistle sounded, and the Yellow Bird IV. 2 slowly sailed into the dock of the secret shipyard under the research group, ready to undergo routine maintenance.

The shipyard now has four slipways, one semi-finished vessel under construction on slipways 1 and 2, and an experimental vessel under repair on slipway 3. As for the ship in the event of sudden damage, it can also be repaired urgently.

Huanghu IV. No. 2 is the second experimental ship in the fourth generation of experimental ships produced by the factory, and the steam engine currently loaded is the most advanced Hanfeng No. 5 engine in China.

In the early experiments, it was not impossible for a steam boiler to explode.

Such experiments and inventions, from a blank slate to a near-mature sample, will cost not only a lot of money and time, but also countless painstaking efforts and blood of researchers.

Although the people in the research group are struggling with the dispute between the 'paddle wheel' and the 'propeller', in fact, whether it is a paddle steamer or a propeller ship, in order to be recognized by the society, reliability comes first.

A novel invention on a steamer, even in the more disparate Europe and the United States, was full of irony and discrimination until the reliability of the steamship was proven.

So you can imagine the huge pressure that this thing will face after it is launched in China.

Therefore, Chen Ming demanded that the ship must not have any problems.

When Fulton was experimenting with the ship, he heard that the machine was lying on its stomach at the beginning, but it was only after the problem was urgently dealt with that the ship was officially running, and the speed reached 9 kilometers per hour, that is, nearly five knots.

Of course, that ship in Fulton was made of iron. [Madan, many people say that the "Claremont" is a propeller ship, but it is clearly written in history textbooks that it is the first steam-powered paddle steamer. Hemp egg]

China's experimental ships are definitely not as large as the historic Fulton ship, and it is difficult to say whether the power level of the steam engine is higher or lower than that of the Watt steam engine more than ten years later.

At the same time, the research group needs to consider the new shipbuilding technology, Chen Ming has already told them the concept of iron ships and ironclad ships, not to mention that even if they don't mention iron ships and ironclad ships, only talk about the warship manufacturing of wooden steamships, can the firepower arrangement and cabin allocation be limited to the firepower?

At the same time, the vehicles and ships in Chinese history will also be a great inspiration to them.

Paddle steamers don't necessarily have to use large wheels or a set of wheels, and ships can also use small wheels. Lined up with small ships, such warships are less likely to be destroyed by enemy artillery fire in battle.

The wheels of the paddle steamer are their Achilles' heel.

Therefore, the research team is very clear about their research direction, even if they really justify the name of the 'paddle wheel' in front of the emperor, then they need to reduce the size of the wheel as much as possible, hide the mess as much as possible, and at the same time speed up the speed of the ship as much as possible, and ensure the reliability of the paddle wheel and the problem of easy replacement.

In short, it is impossible for this research group to be completely caught in a "paddle wheel" and "propeller" controversy. At best, it would be a headache for the leader and head of the study group, and it would be one of the subordinate groups, not the entire study group.

Chen Ming had a vague promise that after this was completed, the research team would not be promoted to the research institute.

Although this institute is still a subordinate branch of the Zhongshan Academy of Natural Sciences, the level is only half a level away from the big boss of the Academy of Sciences. That enjoys the real treatment of the second grade, and the big boss of the Academy of Sciences enjoys the treatment of the cabinet ministers. And the actual official rank can also fall to the third rank or from the third rank.

Fame and fortune are moving, and no one wants to watch a green cloud road slip away in front of their eyes.

When the battle between paddle wheels and propellers in the steamship research group is over, the steamship will be formally integrated. On the basis of civilian ships, warships will be divided, and then there will be pure iron steamers and ironclad ships.

Although neither scenario is realistic.

A pure iron steamer may actually float on the water, but the weight is too large and seriously affects the speed of the ship. Therefore, the iron-wood combination of ship materials is more suitable for reality.

And the ironclad ship, which is also unrealistic.

Even if a ship with a layer of ironclad thick enough to withstand rockets does not sink into the water, its speed will become that of a snail.

Of course, the dual-purpose power of the sail proposed by the emperor was still very constructive. Greatly developed their thinking and pointed out the direction.

However, once this steamer is implemented, it will have a huge and immeasurable impact on domestic and foreign sea and river transportation. There are also sailors, and the sailors of the future generation will not be able to be trained by practice alone, and the technical staff will have to be trained by regular seafarer schools.

It's just that if the ship really has practicality, then the sealed cabin technology, which was a little less fashionable in the era of sail warships, seems to be reborn.

And what is unimaginable to many members of the steamship research group is that Emperor Lao Tzu also thought of this.

So some people sighed that if the emperor did not rebel and lived in Lushan in peace and stability, I am afraid that he would become a more awesome existence than Huang Luzhuang and Dai Zi. It's just that in the past world of the Manchu Qing Dynasty, they had no chance of getting ahead. Strange lewd skills!

……

The development of trains and ships is not hidden from the top, it is not hidden from the top. So, don't look at the battle between paddle steamers and propellers, but the research and development of ships has come to an end, and many people have been eyeing him.

Whether it is a paddle wheel or a propeller, the speed of four or five knots is nothing on the sea, and it is not particularly outstanding on the Yangtze River, but what about in the Grand Canal? And what about the other rivers? For example, the Hai River, the Yellow River, the Daqing River, the Pearl River, and the Min River?

This speed is very competitive in inland waterway transport.

Moreover, if the voyage is carried out by a steam engine, then a lot of manpower can be reduced on the ship, which also compresses the cost. As long as the price and carrying capacity of such a small ship are appropriate, at the current domestic coal price, this small steamship can definitely be launched.

Of course, some people have already taken a fancy to the ship, so there are also people who have a fancy to the train.

Like the name of the ship, the train was also the name given by Emperor Chen. It was a new form of transportation, and the biggest thing in common with the steamship was that it was powered by steam.

Now Chen Han's train has been produced to the third generation, just like the ship was named 'Yellow Bird', the train was also named 'Dongfang Hong' by Chen Ming, which has a special commemorative significance in the original time and space.

Pulling six carts, carrying 500 stone [25 metric tons], it traveled at a speed of 10 miles per hour. This is the performance of Dongfanghong III.

It already has a certain practicality. Mines and large docks everywhere will love this artifact.

But there are still many hidden dangers in Dongfanghong III.

Stability is one thing, comfort is the second thing, and safety when cornering is the third.

But there are already some people who have their eyes on it.

Thankfully, the people who know about the development of trains and ships are all high-ranking figures in society. Whether you are in politics or business, you must consider politics and the overall situation when considering interests.

So the transporters and groups who were destined to benefit from the impact of ships and trains were not yet aware of the emergence of these two epoch-making new inventions.

So the two study groups have not been hindered until now. Much luckier than Fulton and Stephenson in history. They all invented and operated themselves in the midst of frequent attacks, and when Stephenson was building the railroad, the construction site was also shelled by the river transport group.

Because the invention and application of every new type of means of transportation with great significance and value in society will inevitably greatly harm the rights and interests of some vested interests.

This is the inevitable result of social progress.