After Lucia's adulthood, Bianbu Town also entered the last month of winter.
For the demon month, the end of winter does not mean the end, the heavy snow often lasts until the second spring, as to when Quiet, it is completely resigned.
According to past experience, the end of the first half of the first month of the Spring Festival is a rather difficult day; in the first half of the first month At the end of the period, it is a very difficult day; if it continues to the second month, it will become a difficult day to survive.
but this is just what the town’s residents have encountered.
This year's situation has changed a lot. Even if the evil month lasts until the end of the second month of spring, the wheat stored in the granary is enough for everyone to fill their stomachs.
Roland is naturally not satisfied with the passing line of all people who are not starving to death. These days he has been eager to kneel at his desk and draw Drawing a blueprint and conceiving your next big production plan. The whole plan is divided into military and civilian aspects. The former includes the construction of new weapons factories, bicycle factories, docks, and shallow-water heavy artillery ships. The latter is mainly for water, warm and electric tees in residential areas, and iron. The popularization of agricultural tools.
It’s Lucia White who is full of motivation. After thoroughly testing her new abilities, Roland clearly recognizes the end of mass production. A limit has also been resolved, and the productivity of the town will usher in a new peak as the population grows.
This limitation is the supply of materials.
Modern smelting is a very complex discipline, and steel production is one of the most important parameters for measuring an industrial country. Roland doesn't know much about it, and the town's ironmaking capacity is still very backward. The technology is not beyond this era, and the scale is not comparable to the private smelters of some mining businessmen. When the iron ore is smelted into pig iron in the brick blast furnace, the good quality is sent to the steam engine, and the poor quality is handed over to Anna for further smelting into steel. This process is completely uncontrollable, and the carbon content is high and low. The materials that can be used can only be filled with two or three carriages during a busy day, which greatly limits the production capacity of the steam engine manufacturer.
And Anna's special furnace can convert inferior pig iron into quality controllable steel, but the output is only enough for military factories. When it is in the fall, it can basically meet the needs of the town. After the arrival of winter, the army has been expanded twice, and with the development of new firearms and artillery, this steel is somewhat stretched.
Lucia's evolution can be described as a shot intensive agent, the targeted separation ability can easily remove the bad components in the material, and can regulate the proportion of each element in the melting stage. Keep each furnace steel in a performance.
It can be said that with Anna and Lucia, the level of smelting in Bentham Town is enough to instantly improve several grades.
To this end, Roland has let Anna put down the rest of her work and concentrate on making a new generation of extra large furnaces.
The new furnace has more than ten times the size of the special furnace designed for her, the length is extended to 50 meters, the width is ten meters, and the height is nearly four meters. It looks like a slender pool. It is essentially the same as the previous generation of special furnaces, still an iron box, no heating equipment, all rely on Anna's black fire smelting. However, it is buried in the ground, relying on the soil to support the pressure of the molten iron on the four walls, and there is a walkway in the center, which allows Anna to simultaneously heat the iron ingots on both sides.
It has only one advantage, that is, the volume is large enough - if it is smelted according to the previous method, the limestone used for removing impurities is a large number, and It takes a lot of work to clean up the generated impurities. Feeding and agitation are also a big problem, so it must not be done too much. Now, there is no such concern at all. As long as the pig iron is dissolved, the harmful components such as phosphorus and sulfur can be removed by Lucia.
Roland intends to build a new batch of kiln, together with the old blast furnace and the old shaft furnace, only responsible for the first smelting, regardless of the quality of the finished product, as long as the ore can be melted and turned into The square iron ingots will do. Then, these iron ingots are put into the new furnace for secondary refining. The formed molten steel flows into the lower-level template through the gate, and directly forms the material for processing. After that, the steam engine factory will also turn into steel production, which is inevitable. Can bring a stronger source of power to the town.