Chapter 63 (1/2)

It's really hard to say whether the ”big, steel making” movement in Huaxia was right or wrong.

From the perspective of later generations, the movement that swept the whole country was wrong. It wasted people's money and seriously damaged the fragile industrial foundation at that time.

However, at that time, this was not true, otherwise it would not have formed such a nationwide steel-making situation.

Of course, it's too far away from Shi Xiong. He doesn't want to judge it right or wrong. He claims that he is not qualified to judge it. He can only say that it was an inappropriate move in an inappropriate era, from the top to the common people, because they did not fully realize their own scientific and technological level.

However, thanks to the large-scale smelting and steel movement, Shi Xiong has seen the local blast furnace left over from that year in some remote villages in the province. At that time, a retired leader of the Museum once said that these local blast furnaces had witnessed the changes of an era and were the condensation of the wisdom of the people at that time. There is nothing wrong with local blast furnaces, so they should not be destroyed in the wind and sun.

It was with the instructions of the old leader that Shi Xiong, who had just joined the work, followed the master to maintain and repair the local blast furnaces and found out the structure of these local blast furnaces.

In fact, even the modern iron making blast furnaces of later generations are not so complicated in structure and principle, even worse than the earth kilns for coking. Although these local blast furnaces are built by local methods, their principle and structure are no different from those of modern ironmaking blast furnaces.

That is to say, a round cylinder with a diameter of about two and a half meters and a height of about five meters is built out of stone or red brick mixed with soil. The smaller it is, the narrower it is, the narrower it is, the narrower it is, and the top of the furnace throat is sealed, and then the gas outlet and feed inlet are reserved. The furnace interior is pasted with a thick layer of refractory clay, some soil blast furnace without refractory clay, simply directly with mud paste, the main purpose is to prevent high temperature.

At the junction of bosh and hearth, there are inclined upward air inlets. The air produced by bellows or blower will be injected into bosh from these air inlets to accelerate the combustion of coke in blast furnace.

At the bottom of the blast furnace hearth, there are two discharge ports respectively. The bottom of one end is the special discharge port for molten iron, and the higher part of the other end is the special discharge port for slag.

During ironmaking, coke, iron ore and limestone are placed in the hearth and furnace belly according to a certain proportion, then ignition is made, and the air box or blower is used to blow into the furnace belly continuously. With the continuous increase of furnace temperature, iron ore and limestone will melt into molten iron containing waste slag.

Because the density of hot metal is very high, which can exceed 7, and the density is much higher than that of the slag, so when the hot metal is produced, the slag from ironmaking floats on the hot metal.

This forms the situation of hot metal in the bottom and slag in the top.

Therefore, the taphole is at the bottom, and the slag taphole is one block higher than the taphole. In this way, the slag produced by ironmaking will flow out from the slag outlet, and the pure molten iron will flow out from the bottom outlet.

This kind of local blast furnace is bell type blast furnace, which is a kind of local blast furnace whose coke consumption rate is far lower than that of cupola type blast furnace and iron tapping rate is far higher than that of cupola type blast furnace. At that time, some large-scale ironmaking sites mostly used this kind of bell type earth blast furnace.

This thing is really not difficult for the stone bear, just like the gourd painting ladle.

Although the local blast furnace built in this way is very primitive, it is the most advanced in this era. Even in Europe, there is no such bell type blast furnace.

Of course, in terms of the current strength of the gaoshu tribe, there is no need to build such a large earth blast furnace. Although in the division of blast furnace, even if the blast furnace is less than 100 cubic meters, that kind of small blast furnace is too big for today's gaoshu tribe.