Chapter 22 Grandma Zhang enters the Grand View Garden (11) to generate electricity

"Excuse me, master, what do we need to do to subdue the thunderbolt? Lightning is usually high in the air and rarely slashes into the ground like the last time. You say, if we make a kite and fly it into the sky on a rainy day, can we draw down thunder and lightning? Zuo Ci is really a very brainy person, so he thought of a way to come out so quickly.

"What!" Liu Hou was taken aback, why is this old man so crazy, compared to Franklin.

"This ......, isn't this okay?" Zuo Ci touched the back of his head and said a little stupidly, like a child who made a mistake.

"Okay! It's too good, and if you want to die, it's guaranteed to work right away. Liu Hou couldn't help but laugh. Although I thought he was crazy, I couldn't help but smack my tongue when I thought that he had the same spirit of scientific exploration as Franklin.

Benjamin?? Franklin was an 18th-century American, and the Chinese remember him best for using a kite to catch lightning, and he is not so familiar with his other achievements. However, in the real world, he was an almost all-round man, a famous politician, diplomat, philosopher, scientist, writer and navigator, and a great leader of the American Revolution.

"Your method can indeed lead lightning down, but you have to remember that lightning contains very, very, very large amounts of electrical energy, which can burn you into black charcoal in an instant." In order to deepen Zuo Ci's impression and prevent him from really doing such stupid things in the future, Liu Hou used three "very".

"Thunder and lightning are not something we can touch at the moment, and you have to write this conclusion down so that future generations will not accidentally die from it. Well, if you want to write a warning, a warning to future generations, you will say that lightning contains a very huge amount of energy, and it cannot be channeled and stored without equipment and materials that are large enough and strong enough. If you do this rashly, you can easily lose your life, and if you want to do this kind of testing, you must have everything in place to ensure the safety of personnel, such as evacuating all personnel from the test site. ”

After all, even in the later generations of Liu Hou's life, lightning power generation was only a theoretically feasible science fantasy, and no one or any institution had ever truly realized this ideal. In order to avoid that in the long river of history in the future, there will be scientific maniacs like Zuo Ci and Fulin who have the same idea and die for it, Liu Hou can only be verbose. Of course, he can't completely block this road of scientific research and exploration, but only remind future generations to do a good job.

"Well, I wrote it down." Zuo Cifen wrote a book, and soon recorded Liu Hou's teachings, which is exactly what a standard three-good student looks like. "So how do we get electricity?" He finally raised the issue that he was most concerned about.

"First of all, we need to have a battery to store electricity." Liu Hou thought for a while and said.

He missed the old days of electricity too much. Fans, lights, refrigerators, TVs, computers...... He had been away from this qiē for a long time, so long that some of his memories were a little blurry. Now we have finally seen a glimmer of light, through the efforts of Zuo Ci's master and apprentice in the past few years, there is a material basis for generating electricity, and with electricity, everything is possible......

"I'm going to tell you a way to make lead-acid batteries. First of all, we need to have sulfuric acid as the electrolyte, just put the sulfuric acid in a crockpot. ”

In the past few years, Tongguò has been calcining and refining various ores sent from various places, and Zuo Ci has produced sulfuric acid. After all, sulfur is not a new thing, Zuo Ci used to have a lot of contact with alchemy, and in recent years, in order to make gunpowder, Liu Hou has sent people to buy and mine sulfur.

The sulfur dioxide obtained by calcining sulfur is sulfurous acid when dissolved in water, and sulfuric acid can be obtained by oxidizing sulfurous acid with an oxidant. As an important reagent for a variety of chemical substances, Zuo Ci has long prepared sulfuric acid.

"Then there's the issue of electrodes, which are mostly made of lead and its oxides, with lead dioxide for the positive electrode and a lead rod for the negative electrode. Both electrodes are immersed in sulfuric acid and separated by a partition. Liu Hou continued to dig out the memories of the lead battery in his head.

Lead and its oxide Zuo Ci are both unusually familiar, and the familiar Cheng dù is higher than Liu Hou. Zuo Ci has been refining alchemy all his life, and the most familiar thing is lead and mercury, which is the second most commonly used material in his previous alchemy.

"By the way, the partition in the middle is to prevent the two electrodes from short-circuiting. Uh, I think about it, what is the best partition to use? Liu Hou thought for a while, but he couldn't think of what to use, after all, there were too few materials that could be used now.

"Forget it, let's use ceramics, you ask people to make a ceramic plate, which can be suitable for fixing in the middle of that clay pot, and poke a lot of small holes in the ceramic plate, so that the electrolyte can be passed smoothly. Oh, by the way, don't use a clay pot, you just let the ceramic craftsman make a ceramic box, make a rectangular shape, that will be easier to use, and make a card slot in the middle, just enough to cha into the partition. Liu Hou added.

"This is the battery, the two electrodes are tied to copper wires as wires, and the battery is basically completed, and then there is the problem of power generation."

"This, this battery is not used to generate electricity, right?" Zuo Ci asked.

"Of course not, this is a battery, which is used to store electricity, and a generator is used to generate electricity." Liu Hou explained.

"The most important thing in making a generator is two big magnets, the bigger the better. And then there's a rotor, I'll draw a pattern for you later. And then there is the copper wire, well, this copper wire should be enameled wire, that is, the appearance should be coated with a layer of paint to insulate it from the outside world. ”

"Master, we have this magnet, but I don't know how big it is." Zuo Ci asked.

"It's about that big." Liu Hou casually gestured to a piece the size of a basin.

Zuo Ci's face was embarrassed, "This ...... How could there be such a big magnet in the world? ”

Chinese have long known magnets, which are generally used to make medicine, and are said to have the effects of calming the liver and latent yang, calming the nerves, brightening the ears and eyes, and calming the breath. The magnet was also made into a sinan (the predecessor of the compass) to guide the way. The Yellow Emperor's guide car is estimated to have parts made of magnets, otherwise it would not have been possible to point to the south all the time.

But it is indeed rare to see a magnet as big as Liu Hou's comparison, and most of the magnets that Zuo Ci has seen are small pieces of magnets, not to mention that he has never seen a basin as big, and he has never even seen a big bowl as big.

Legend has it that after Qin Shi Huang unified China, he built a very large Afang Palace in Xianyang, the national capital, and there was a magnet gate in the Afang Palace, which was completely made of magnets. If anyone with an iron object wants to assassinate him, he just passes through there and the magnet door will suck him in.

"If you can get this magnet door, you can build a hydroelectric power station." Liu Hou thought. But the age of Qin Shi Huang is too far away from now, and it is said that Afang Palace was burned by Xiang Yu with a handful of flowers, where to find the legendary magnet door?

"Let's collect it slowly first, there will be a brave man under the heavy reward, you ask my uncle to release the news of the heavy purchase, and someone will always help us find it." Liu Houdao. "It's really not possible, only to use the small magnets together."

Liu Hou also sighed a little in his heart, in the later generations, it is not difficult to find a permanent magnet, now it is not easy to find a larger magnet, even if you find it, the estimated magnetic field strength of this natural magnet is far less than the strong magnet in later generations, so that the efficiency of power generation will be greatly reduced.

"Yes, I wrote it down. I'll get ready later. I just don't know how to make this enameled wire yet. ”

Liu Hou explained the concept of enameled wire to him again, and said: "As for how to tightly wrap a layer of lacquer on the copper wire, you need to figure out how to do it yourself." I can't remember that much, or you can try mixing tung oil and rosin to increase the stickiness of the lacquer. Whether it works or not, you still need to experiment. ”

Without the chemical foundation of later generations, no polyester materials, no plastics, no rubber, it is really not so easy to wrap an insulating layer on copper wire, which is indeed a great test for Zuo Ci.

When Zuo Ci heard that he could master the power of thunder and lightning, he was as excited as if he had been beaten with chicken blood, where could he take care of so much, for him, in order to achieve this goal, it was worth making any sacrifice. It really carries forward the spirit of not being afraid of hardship and not afraid of death.

Then, Liu Hou drew him the pattern of the generator rotor and asked him to find someone to build it. This is not very difficult, the rotor is the part that winds the copper wire in the middle of the generator, and the key is those grooves, which Liu Hou drew not long after.

The power to drive the generator Liu Hou proposed two schemes: wind power and water power. Hydroelectric turbines are now used in some factories and are technically mature, which is one of the reasons why Liu Hou chose to build these factories by the river.

However, the disadvantage of water power is that there are restrictions on geographical location, Zuo Ci's real yàn room and Liu Hou's watchtower, the two places that need electricity most in the future, are in the "Ministry of Industry", and there is still a certain distance from the riverside. At present, it is necessary to pull a wire through the "Ministry of Industry" to reach these two places, and it is obviously still a lot of problems to be solved, and the cost is not cost-effective.

After weighing the pros and cons, Liu Hou and Zuo Ci decided to use wind power to generate electricity. In the first phase, they planned to build a big windmill on the top of the watchtower where Zuo Cishi's yàn room was located, and then build one on Liu Hou's watchtower "Houlu" after the test was successful.

Liu Hou imitated the style of the Dutch windmill and drew a pattern and handed it to Zuo Ci for him to perfect. The windmill wings designed by Liu Hou are 5 meters long, which can only be said to be a shrunken version of the Dutch windmill, even so, it is not easy to build at the current level of craftsmanship, but now Liu Hou has gathered a lot of skilled craftsmen here, and Liu Hou believes that they will solve these problems for themselves.

Others don't say it, as long as Ma Jun knows that he wants to build such a novel thing, he will definitely be very interested, and he will definitely strongly ask to join the research and development process of windmills and generators.

There is nothing to say about the wing part of the windmill, but the size is larger, the materials consumed are more, and the labor is more. The gears, shafts and other transmission components inside are the key. It not only involves material science such as metal smelting, but also the key is the problem of precise mechanical structure.

In terms of mechanics, Zuo Ci and Ge Xuan are both weak points, but Ma Jun and Huang Yueying are both masters in mechanics, and this kind of precision mechanism is suitable for them to design and manufacture. Liu Hou asked Zuo Ci to form a temporary research team to break down the problems and assign them according to different specialties, each of whom was responsible for solving problems in his own field.

Zuo Ci recorded the master's instructions one by one, and after today's discussion, he felt more and more that his knowledge as a little immortal master was as deep as the deep sea, and it was unfathomable.

The day was spent in such discussions, and Liu Hou and Zuo Ci talked until dark before returning to their watchtowers to rest.