In the fifteenth year of Chengshun, with the further development of smelting technology in the Dachu Empire's industrial sector, the Daye Stirring Method (Pudelin Method) was developed, which enabled the Dachu Empire to produce large-scale industrial production, which was extremely important for the development of the entire industry. Important low carbon steel.

This also directly drives the development of the national defense industry!

The Navy was the first to follow suit. In the fall, it was the first to propose the use of steel instead of wood as part of the load-bearing structure of warships.

Trying to use the excellent properties of steel to obtain a series of load-bearing properties that are better than wood, and then promote the development of the overall performance of war, such as using the excellent properties of wrought iron to build larger warships, such as more than three thousand tons or even more Large-tonnage battleship.

At the same time, the excellent properties of steel are used to reduce weight as much as possible while ensuring the structural strength of the ship.

This may sound strange. After all, wood is lighter than steel. Why is it that ships built with steel are lighter? The reason is very simple, that is, if a certain strength is to be ensured, for example, the ribs of a battleship have very high strength requirements, and When the performance of wood itself is limited, in order to ensure strength, thicker and thicker wood is needed, and denser ship ribs are laid.

Although the wood itself is lighter, more wood is needed to ensure the strength of the ship.

Although wrought iron is heavier, it has better strength. Less wrought iron can be used to ensure the overall strength of the ship.

Of course, this also puts forward higher requirements for the steel smelting industry, requiring that the wrought iron parts produced have higher performance, and on the premise of ensuring strength and toughness, the processability must also be ensured...

That is to say, the carbon content must be controlled at a certain level. It cannot be too low, otherwise the performance cannot be guaranteed, and it cannot be too high. If it is too high, the current processing capacity of the Dachu Empire cannot be processed...

So this is very contradictory. Even if the steel factory can produce better high-carbon steel, it cannot be used...because it is simply impossible to carry out large-scale mechanized processing of high-carbon steel.

Therefore, the carbon content of the material depends on the processing level and application requirements, and cannot be determined casually.

This is also the reason why the wrought iron produced by Daye Steel Company has more than ten different specifications. Different industries have different requirements for the strength, toughness and processability of steel.

The size of the parts also directly affects the processing level.

The larger the parts, the more difficult it is to process them.

Of course, these are all because the overall smelting level of the Chu Empire is still relatively limited. For example, the obvious indicator of furnace temperature barely reached 1,400 degrees after more than ten years of hard work.

If the furnace temperature can be reached to more than 1,500 degrees Celsius, then there is no need to go to so much trouble and pure molten iron can be produced directly, because the melting point of iron is 138 degrees.

After producing pure molten iron, the follow-up is simple. Carburizing can be carried out according to the needs of the material. By appropriately adding carbon elements, iron-carbon alloys with different carbon contents can be obtained, which is steel.

When the time comes, if you want low carbon steel, you will have low carbon steel; if you want high carbon steel, you will have high carbon steel.

Moreover, various other elements can be added according to the needs to create a variety of different ferroalloy materials.

In addition, once the furnace temperature reaches the required level, direct casting can be used to obtain large steel parts with performance that meets the required requirements, instead of only getting hard and brittle pig iron as in the past...

In particular, very large steel parts can basically only rely on casting, and the production and processing level of large steel parts often represents the basic capabilities of a country's heavy industry.

Even in later generations, only a few truly powerful heavy industry countries will be able to directly cast those ultra-large parts that can easily weigh hundreds of tons... not to mention hundreds of tons, even tens of tons of casting capacity is not something that all countries can do.

It can be played.

As for today's... Da Chu Empire, it still needs a long way to reach this level. At least for now, it is not possible. They have not even solved the most basic problem of furnace temperature and cannot completely melt pure iron.<

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Therefore, they can only use a more primitive method, first making low-carbon steel with lower carbon content for casting or forging, and then adding carbon elements in the subsequent process to improve the performance.

But no matter what, the Chu Empire has initially solved the mass production problem just now.

For this reason, the Navy has also launched the iron-ribbed wooden hull ship plan. This plan not only explores and studies steel as a load-bearing structure of ships, seeks to further improve the performance of warships and reduce costs, but also undertakes the task of replacing wood with steel as a

The heavy responsibility of the ship's ribs.

This point has nothing to do with performance or anything, as long as it is because the warships and large armed merchant ships used by the Dachu Empire Navy are all new ship types, and this new ship type is improved based on the Galen ship type.

Let’s not talk about the quality of this type of ship, but they have one characteristic, that is, there are a large number of ribs in the ship frame.

These ship ribs are not straight, but curved.

Due to the poor plasticity of wood, it is difficult to make originally straight wood into a curved shape. The only option is to choose wood with a certain degree of natural bending as the ship rib material.

As you can imagine, this kind of material is difficult to find, and if manual intervention is used in the wood production process, it will take a long time, not years...decades!

A report was submitted to the Ship Administration Department, saying that the ship ribs must be made of natural bent wood, and the local production is very small. A considerable part needs to be imported from various places in Southeast Asia, but the quantity is not large, even though the empire has now collected it all over the world.

This kind of natural bent wood, but in the long run, I am afraid that there will not be enough rib material for shipbuilding in a few years.

The Iron Rib can perfectly solve this problem.

There is a lot of steel for the Chu Empire, so the requirements for iron ribs for shipbuilding are higher, and production is more troublesome, but again, these can be solved as long as a certain price is paid.<

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Many factors eventually led the Navy to launch the vigorous iron-ribbed wooden hull ship plan.

Then he went a step further and planned to restart the iron-cast artillery plan again after more than ten years, trying to reduce the cost of artillery by casting wrought iron artillery.

However, although the Navy launched the so-called wrought iron casting artillery plan, the Army was indifferent... It is not that the Army does not pay attention to wrought iron and does not know the situation of wrought iron. In fact, the Army knew about and paid attention to the large iron industry earlier than the Navy.

The wrought iron produced by the Smelting Iron and Steel Company has been used even earlier. Nowadays, the mounts of newly produced new artillery have begun to use these wrought irons.

But... these are only limited to the gun mount!

As for the gun barrels, the Army still firmly uses bronze barrels!

The Army is not the Navy, and both sides have different requirements for artillery.

What the Navy requires is power and accuracy, but it is not sensitive to weight. At the same time, because the Navy's artillery is big, it is also more sensitive to cost.

That's why the Navy said that if iron-cast artillery can achieve 70 to 80% of the performance of bronze artillery, they would dare to directly equip it on a large scale.

But as for the Army, they are very sensitive to the weight of artillery. On the contrary, power is secondary, and weight is what the Army values ​​most.

As for cost, the Army's artillery pieces are all artillery with small caliber and relatively short barrels. Compared with the Navy's large-caliber long barrel cannons, they are much cheaper.

The barrel of a large-caliber artillery gun of the Navy weighs two to three tons...but the barrel of a commonly used 11 mm field gun of the Army weighs only a few hundred kilograms.

There is also a big gap in quantity. The navy's battleships are equipped with dozens of artillery pieces, and the first-class battleships are equipped with more than a hundred artillery pieces.

As for the Army, it is a combat-ready first-class division with only a few dozen artillery pieces.

So the army seems to have a lot of artillery, but in fact the navy is the largest user of artillery...

Therefore, relatively speaking, the Army is not as sensitive to the cost of artillery as the Navy.

Coupled with the requirements for accuracy, service life and weight, the Army firmly chose bronze artillery.

Unless cast-iron artillery can keep up in performance, they will not choose cast-iron artillery.

However, although the Army firmly continues to use bronze artillery when it comes to artillery, the Army's opinions are different when it comes to muskets!

Although the Army has not made any big moves like the Navy, in fact many of the Army's weapons and equipment have benefited from the mass production of wrought iron.

How should I put it, the procurement costs of weapons and equipment related to iron have dropped significantly.

In the past, the output of wrought iron was low and the cost was high. But now that Daye Iron and Steel Company has developed the mixing method, the output of wrought iron has increased by leaps and bounds, and the cost has also dropped significantly.

This is also reflected in the cost of weapons and equipment of various iron products as end products.

After all, almost all iron products today are processed from wrought iron. As the output of wrought iron increases and the cost decreases, the price of iron products will also decrease accordingly.

Whether it's the army or the navy, almost the entire defense industry has benefited from the technological breakthroughs of Daye Steel Company.

In fact, the national defense industry is still small, and the real beneficiaries are the entire industrial sector of the Chu Empire.

The output of steel and coal is regarded as an important indicator of industrialization because these two things are extremely important.

Strictly speaking, coal also serves steel.

Therefore, if you want to measure the national strength of a certain country in modern times, well, specifically during the first industrial revolution and the second industrial revolution, just look at their steel production.

Simple and clear!

During this period, countries with large steel production were basically major powers.

And the one with the most is the undisputed world boss!

Even during the Third Industrial Revolution, although steel production capacity is no longer the most important indicator, it is still an important indicator of national strength.

This shows the importance of steel!

In today's Great Chu Empire, the development of the steel industry also plays a very strategic role.

As the steel industry of the Da Chu Empire continued to develop, the national power of the Da Chu Empire also continued to increase.

At the beginning of Funiu Mountain and even in the first two years after the official proclaimed the emperor and the founding of the country, the Chu Empire did not have any steel industry, and even the iron materials needed to make weapons were smuggled and purchased from outside.

After crossing the river and capturing Wuchang, and even capturing Daye, the Chu Empire officially began to develop the steel industry. At that time, there was no technology at all. It was just throwing money and people, and relying on the most primitive methods to forcibly increase production.

.

Daye Iron and Steel Company was established during this period.

At that time, the technical content of Daye Steel Company was very low, and the smelting methods of steel were all old-fashioned. In particular, the production of wrought iron still relied on the primitive method of frying steel. In order to obtain enough wrought iron, Daye Steel Company at that time

The steel company's steel-frying factory is extremely large in scale, with a large number of workers, and they are all densely packed with furnaces used for stir-frying steel!

Later, through continuous improvement, water power was introduced, and larger iron furnaces were built. Although the steel frying method was still used, mechanical equipment replaced manpower to a certain extent, and the scale of production capacity increased.

In fact, this little production capacity can basically only meet the needs of national defense and basic people's livelihood needs, and the overall output is still very low.

But even if this is the only thing that makes Luo Zhixue look down on production capacity, it still allows the Da Chu Empire to have a wrought iron production capacity that dwarfs other countries. These wrought irons not only meet domestic national defense and necessary people's livelihood needs, but also produce

The large-scale export of various iron products, especially weapons, brought huge amounts of foreign exchange income to the Chu Empire.

And now... the output of wrought iron produced by Daye Steel Company in half a year is more than the output of wrought iron produced by all steel companies across the country last year combined...

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To be continued...