Song Yingxing and his entourage settled down in Daye County, adapted to the environment, and slowly started their work.

With the funding of Shen Daotai, craftsmen were recruited everywhere and talents from all walks of life were matched.

With sufficient financial support, he can also buy what he lacks without hesitation, and gradually build up the laboratory and research team.

These things are complicated, and before I know it, I have been busy for more than half a month, and the time has quietly come to the second half of the lunar month, and there will be less than ten days before the New Year.

Although busy, the results are also very gratifying, at least the first batch of improved blast furnaces, the structural verification has been completed.

The refractory brick materials used may be iteratively optimized, but the semi-finished products in the current research and development have increased by about one or two hundred degrees in terms of high temperature resistance compared with the original blast furnace bricks.

The coal coking process has also run through in an orderly manner, and the experience of the testers was originally relied on to adjust the air intake during coking, but now it has been upgraded to rely on the valve structure and operating procedures of the furnace itself to control the gas supply.

For this reason, the craftsmen also created the first professional coke oven that can operate reliably. In the future, while improving and expanding production, it seems that the situation is very good.

On the twenty-first day of the lunar month, Shen Shuren was known to Song Yingxing and Song Mingde's uncle and nephew, saying that it was the acceptance date for the new test blast furnace to open the furnace and tap iron.

Shen Shuren was also very excited, and went to the iron factory early in the morning to carefully observe the actual effect.

He personally supervised the military industry farming in Wuchang Prefecture, and after almost two months, he finally had the first batch of tangible results.

When we arrived at the ironworks, we could see a new furnace standing tall and majestically at least seven or eight feet taller than the old blast furnace.

If the subsequent refractory brick material formula is further upgraded and the compressive strength at high temperature at the bottom of the furnace wall is further improved, then the blast furnace has the potential to continue to be heightened.

The higher the blast furnace, the more adequate the degree of reaction and the higher the production efficiency and product quality.

Of course, in addition to being taller, more resistant to high temperatures, and changing the fuel, there are other small new designs in this blast furnace.

For example, in the ancient Chinese civilization in blast furnace metallurgy, they did not pay much attention to the preheating of the inlet gas. So much so that when making iron, the temperature in the furnace never rises too high.

Although Shen Shuren doesn't understand technology, he also roughly knows the direction of his efforts, after all, he read a lot of books in his previous life, so he explained to Song Yingxing a while ago.

Song Yingxing is also very executable, and he solved this problem in less than ten days, and even iterated two or three times-

At the beginning, Song Yingxing thought of adding a preheating chamber directly before the air inlet of the furnace, baking the fire outside the chamber, and adding the air that was about to enter the furnace to a certain temperature.

However, the thermal conductivity of the furnace itself is too poor, and the thermal conductivity of the air itself is even worse, and the heating through a layer of furnace wall is too inefficient and very wasteful of fuel.

Later, Song Yingxing thought of using the exhaust gas that had been burned out, collecting it at the exhaust port, and returning it to the outer layer of the air inlet to create a double-layer pipe. The inner layer is fresh air with high oxygen content, and the outer layer is already very hot exhaust gas, trying to conduct the waste heat of the exhaust gas to the fresh air to save fuel.

However, this trick still only solves the problem of fuel waste, and does not solve the pain point of low thermal conductivity.

Fortunately, Song Yingxing is smart, experienced, and can inspire each other with Shen Shuren, and the two of them worked together to come up with the third version - the preheating chamber that isolates exhaust gas and fresh air was directly changed from refractory brick material to iron pipe.

Of course, the heat exchange efficiency of metal pipes is much stronger than that of masonry, so the efficiency of exhaust gas to transfer heat to fresh air is greatly improved.

Although it is still not high enough, it is much stronger than before. Song Yingxing said at the time that if he was not satisfied, then he had to use copper pipes instead of cast iron pipes-

Everyone on earth knows that copper is a metal with very good thermal conductivity, much better than iron, and among all the metals in the world, only gold and silver have better thermal conductivity than copper.

However, copper is also much more expensive than iron, and it is possible to make a few copper pipes experimentally for heat exchange experiments, or to engage in high-end special steel in the future, you can use a small amount of copper tubes to preheat the blast stove. Shen Shuren is still a little reluctant to produce large-scale production, and he can't afford to spend it.

Fortunately, after Song Yingxing put forward the idea of copper pipes, he also inspired Shen Shuren and reminded him of the water heaters of later generations.

In later generations, for the sake of heat exchange efficiency, didn't the gas water heaters all use curved copper pipes to carry tap water and let the gas flames scorch the copper pipes to boil water quickly?

After all, Shen Shuren is a man, a high-achieving student, even if he is not a science student, he still took it apart and saw that the water heater at home was broken in his previous life. Inspired by this idea, he quickly realized that the thermal conductivity of the material is not good enough, so can it be improved by increasing the surface area?

Even if we just use the cheapest cast iron pipe for air heat exchange, we can also change the mold of the cast iron pipe and directly make it into a pipe with many raised fins on the inner and outer walls of the tube, which is not the same structure as the radiator on the computer CPU in later generations!

And anyway, cast iron things are formed at one time, as long as the mold is opened, the complex shape will not increase the processing difficulty during mass production.

He said to do it, and this is why there is the preheating air chamber of the blast furnace in front of you today - if the wall of the preheating air chamber of this blast furnace is removed, you can see the internal heat exchange iron pipes, which have dense heat dissipation fins like hedgehogs.

Originally, according to the CPU heatsink of later generations, the bottom and top of the heatsink should be the same width, so as to maximize the surface area per unit weight of the heatsink.

However, the casting and mold opening process at the end of the Ming Dynasty was obviously not so precise, and it could not cast a very long thin fin iron pipe, so in fact, the heat exchange tube fins used by Shen Shuren's blast furnace were thick at the bottom and narrow at the top, and the cross-section of the iron pipe was similar to that of a gear.

It is nothing more than a dense row of long rows of sharp teeth on the inner and outer walls, which looks very terrible.

At that time, when Song Yingxing first heard this idea, he was also amazed, and shouted to be taught, saying that he had pondered ingenious things all his life, and had also studied the problem of heat exchange, but why did he not expect to increase the thermal contact area by relying on this.

……

During this time, there were still a lot of details of those arduous research and development processes, and Shen Shuren was distracted for a while, and he couldn't recall them one by one.

Soon, the movement of the blast furnace opening and tapping iron pulled him back from his memory, and in the exclamation of others, he quickly focused his attention on the blacksmith who was operating.

After a tedious iron operation, a batch of freshly baked iron was also transported out, and the craftsmen sweated profusely, even in the middle of winter, wearing protective clothing, it was inevitably hot.

Once the blast furnace is opened, as long as it does not encounter special circumstances, it will not be stopped, so even when the iron is tapped, it is still heating constantly.

The upper furnace mouth is fed, the bottom is tapped, and the cycle is reacted. Each batch of material should be kept in the furnace for a long time, sinking step by step, and finally discharged from the bottom.

Shen Shuren was also very nervous and curious about the result, so he really waited for a while, and after about a cup of tea, Song Mingde came to report with a happy face, saying that this furnace produced 6,000 catties of iron at one time, which was more than double the original production capacity of more than 2,000 catties of iron.

When Shen Shuren heard this number, he was quite excited at first, and then relieved.

After all, it is normal to use coke to speed up the reaction efficiency, preheat the air to increase the furnace temperature, and use refractory bricks to raise the furnace body.

Originally, this was the ironmaking technology of the 1640s, considering the stagnation of technology in the last nearly 100 years of the Ming Dynasty (many technologies of the Ming Dynasty basically stagnated after Jiajing, and there was progress before), in fact, this is equivalent to the level between 1550~1600 years in Europe.

After using the idea of coke ironmaking, it is equivalent to a one-time progress to the modern blast furnace invented by the Netherlands in 1707.

Moreover, the Dutch blast furnace in 1707 in history did not have the idea of "heat dissipation fin preheating air duct". Shen Shuren and Song Yingxing opened three small hangers at one time this time, and the level of smelting technology was at least one generation more advanced than that in 1707.

He estimated that it could be equivalent to the Western science and technology of the 1770s ~ 1780s, that is, on the eve of the industrial song - Watt was the improved steam engine in 1787.

This means that Shen Shuren's current level of ironmaking and steelmaking is roughly equivalent to the level of the country's independence or the eve of France's great song in history.

The level of craftsmanship that can be achieved with these steel cannons can theoretically be compared with the cannons of the early Napoleonic Wars.

(Note: There is still no comparison with the weapons of the late Napoleon, Napoleon fought for more than 20 years, just more than 20 years after the invention of the steam engine, so the military science and technology at that time made rapid progress.) When he entered the war in 1790 and was ousted from power in 1815, the weapons were no longer of the same generation. Shen Shuren did not invent the steam engine, so it can only be compared with the technology of the war in 1790)

If this is compared to the "European Continent" series, it is like the Ming Dynasty used the artillery of level 12 technology in the "European continent" before it was originally Westernized, while the Dutch were using level 15 technology in the same period.

As soon as Shen Shuren opens this hanging, he can directly catch up to the level of the ultimate 18th level of technology and Napoleonic artillery in the European continent. Compared with the latest artillery that the Europeans are using in the 1618~1648 Thirty Years' War, it is more advanced than the third-level technology.

Of course, the premise is that Shen Shuren will be able to keep up with the mechanical structure design and machining technology of making cannons in the future. What he is doing at present is only to ensure that the shortcomings of material science and technology are solved, and machining technology is another field of problem.

Shen Shuren was fiercely thinking about it, while waiting for the results of the quality inspection.

The increase in production can be seen instantly by counting with the naked eye, but the improvement in quality requires time for laboratory testing - mainly to take the material for various strength tests, which always takes some time.

Shen Shuren was a little anxious, so he poured a few cups of tea, drank two pots, and went to the toilet twice, and finally got results.

"My lord! Great joy! The new iron, made of coke, was much denser. If it is used to smelt cast iron and cast directly, I am afraid that it will not have as many sand holes and cavitation as before. If you cast wrought iron, or carburize steel, the texture is definitely much better than now! ”

After Song Mingde and Song Yingxing confirmed the quality inspection results, they were overjoyed one by one, which was also the result of their hard work for many days, and they naturally cherished it.