After spending a night of lasciviousness on Morgan's ship, Scrooge left the yacht "Pirate", still carrying the faint scent of the young girls. Well, Morgan is a very health and safety person, and in order not to get into some kind of health trouble, most of his ships are original and high-quality.

After leaving the Corsair, Scrooge did not go directly back to Fort Duck, but took the train directly to Cleveland. Two days later in the University of Cleveland's Grand Syàn Room, there will be an important and perhaps life-changing room that will change the history of mankind. Scrooge had to keep an eye on it himself. In addition, going directly to Cleveland can also avoid being seen by Dorothea when you go home directly. Although in fact, what the men were doing in that boat besides talking about business, Dorothea was as clear as Mimi, and she didn't intend to do too much. But if a man dares to bring the traces of fooling around home, it will be absolutely intolerable. Well, the last time Scrooge accidentally brought back the smell of perfume, and Dorothea smelled it all at once. Although I took a shower and changed my clothes this time, considering that Dorothea's nose was particularly strong, Scrooge felt that it was better to go directly to Cleveland.

In fact, the real yàn of synthetic ammonia is not set up in the big real yàn room, because considering the high temperature and high pressure, there is a risk of explosion, it is normal for some gas to escape some, of course, it is not impossible to want it to not escape at all, but the cost will be very high. And the smell of ammonia, well, if it is really done in the Dashi yàn room, people in other departments will have to have opinions. So, Scrooge and the others simply bought a small island on Lake Erie and became a real room.

Prior to this, some basic reals had already achieved some results, and this was the first time that these achievements were combined. Now that the equipment has been installed on the island, the crew is working intensively to debug the equipment.

Furnaces for the production of semi-aqueous gas (i.e. a mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen, obtained by passing water vapor through guò hot coke) have been erected, and the corresponding filtration and purification equipment has been installed. Because when producing, the coke or simply coal used cannot be free of impurities, and these impurities, especially sulfur-containing impurities, will be mixed in the water and gas, and if not removed, it will lead to a series of problems. In addition, because the reaction is not completely or something, it is not done well, and even a certain amount of oxygen will be mixed with the half-water gas, well, this is even more dangerous, if you can't remove these things, wait until the pressure is added, the heat is heated, the hydrogen, carbon monoxide, plus the oxygen is mixed - the scene of the explosion is so beautiful that people dare not imagine. In the original history, many people were killed and injured at this step.

Another key piece of equipment is the piston gas compressor, obviously, it is really difficult to pressurize the gas to 5oo atmospheres at one time, so in this practice, Scrooge's people used a graded pressurization method, one level at a time of pressurization, and finally succeeded in pressurizing the air to 500 atmospheres in the previous real yàn. Of course, there is nothing wrong with this, for example, a certain pipe has burst because of quality problems, fortunately it is only high-pressure air that is sprayed out, if it really comes to the production process, all that is sprayed out is hydrogen, plus a small spark, the big firecracker is really exciting, and there is definitely the strength of the people present in a second.

Then there is the conversion tower, which works at 5oo atmospheres and 5oo degrees Celsius at high temperature and high pressure, which is the core equipment of the whole ammonia synthesis, where hydrogen and nitrogen are synthesized into ammonia, which is the most critical and difficult step. However, this thing was still made, but the volume was not large enough, and it was completely incomparable with the big guys with an annual output of hundreds of thousands of tons in later generations.

"Mr. Liebig, how is the catalyst doing?" Scrooge asked the famous father of modern chemistry, whom he borrowed from the Prussians, who now led the entire project team.

"Mr. MacDonald, we've done a lot of practical work, and so far, as you guessed last time, some heavy metals with stable properties seem to work well as catalysts. Well, so far we have tried platinum, rhodium, iridium, osmium, gold, tungsten and other metal elements, and so far, osmium has the best effect, being able to achieve a conversion ratio of 8%. Mr. Liebig replied.

Because it is a reversible reaction, the efficiency of ammonia synthesis from nitrogen and hydrogen is quite low, even at high pressure and temperature, and catalysts must be relied on to improve the efficiency of chemical reactions. However, in this era when there is no even periodic table, although people have already seen the role of catalysts in practice, but the scholars of this era basically do not know anything about the principle of catalysts.

Scrooge knew that in later generations, ammonia synthesis used a composite iron catalyst, which was basically a mixture of ferric tetroxide and a small amount of calcium oxide and alumina. However, in this era, because of the lack of understanding of the principle of the catalyst itself and the mechanism of phenomena such as catalyst poisoning, it is not particularly fine when removing some harmful impurities, so that the composite iron catalyst like this is naturally not easy to be seen, and even if it is, it will be difficult to use because of the phenomenon of catalyst poisoning.

Therefore, in this era, the catalyst that can be used in the ammonia industry is osmium metal, which can achieve a conversion rate of 8% under the catalysis of the world's heaviest metal, at a pressure of up to 5oo atmospheres and a temperature of 5oo degrees Celsius. Then the converted ammonia gas is separated in time, and then the remaining gas is synthesized again, so that enough ammonia can be obtained by repeated operation. As for the use of ammonia to make urea, it is already a simple matter. However, the naming of urea made Scrooge very nerve-wracking. Originally, Scrooge planned to set up a company called Cleveland Company in the United States to specialize in the production of this thing, and even Scrooge once wanted to give this fertilizer a well-known name, which was called "Kinkola". However, the word "Kola" is a northeastern Chinese dialect, and when it is left in the United States, it is completely meaningless when translated. Well, no matter how you look at the name, "Golden Tud" doesn't have the flavor of "Golden Clod".

In the end, Scrooge, who had a bad taste, thought of simply changing the "golden clod" to "soil gold", and when it was time to advertise, he found a few people on the radio station to pretend to be Santa Claus and sing: "I don't give gifts this Christmas, ^, ^, ^, I don't give gifts!" ”

Scrooge had already planned, let the Germans use osmium metal as a catalyst to synthesize ammonia, osmium metal reserves are scarce, it is a very rare metal, naturally the price is high, plus the conversion rate is only about 8% (in fact, most of them are not reached), and Scrooge has secretly completed the conversion rate of about 20% of the iron catalyst, which means that the raw gas needs to be synthesized less times, plus when using iron catalyst, It was even possible to reduce the pressure to 300 atmospheres, so that the cost of procurement and operation of things like vessels, pipes and compressors would be greatly reduced, so that Scrooge believed that his cost in producing urea might be half less than that of the Germans. And this cost advantage means that, at least in markets outside of Germany, the Germans will never be able to compete with Scrooge's "local gold".

"Mr. Liebig, how did you feel during your time at the University of Cleveland? Are you still used to life? Scrooge asked kindly in his newly learned German.

"Ah, it feels good. The equipment in the room is definitely the best I've ever seen, and the professionalism of the staff is no worse than that of Copenhagen. The younger generation, in particular, is growing up very fast. It won't be long before the University of Cleveland will become a great university like Cambridge and Copenhagen, in fact, if you want me to say, it is not bad now, this is a reputation that needs to be accumulated. As for life, the climate here is good, and my English is still enough, so life is quite convenient. ”

"Well, Mr. Riebig, have you ever considered simply staying in Cleveland as a visiting scholar after this program is completed? Well, in case you didn't know, in order to encourage scientific progress, I once set aside a fund to set up a series of 'MacDonald' prizes, including prizes in mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology and medicine, literature, economics, peace activities, etc. Now that it's time to give the prize, I think Mr. Maxwell should be able to win the Physics Prize for his equations, and the research we have now can feed more people and save more people from hunger. The decisive role of nitrogen in crops and the idea of chemical fertilizers are exactly what you came up with. So I feel like you deserve the grand prize in this regard. Of course, this is just my opinion, and the decision on who this award is given is a committee elected by various universities in the United States, but I still have a lot of say in it, at least, I still have the right to nominate it. ”

"Mr. MacDonald, I think you deserve the most awards in chemistry and medicine." Liebig said very seriously.

"Ah, Mr. Libbig, I'm already rich, and I don't need a bonus to do what I want." Scrooge smiled sincerely, "But this bonus, although it is not much, only about 40,000 US dollars, but for a chemist with average financial conditions, it can already reduce a lot of life pressure for him, and allow him to devote more time to research." ”

"In this case, then this bonus should not be given to me, because I am old and about to retire." Liebig smiled, "I'm afraid this is my last research project, and in the future, my experience will be mainly focused on training students." Well, it's a nice place, but when you get old, you miss your hometown......"

"Do you think there is anyone else in this team you are in charge of who will be able to claim this reward?" Scrooge asked. r1o58

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