Chapter 17 Magnetic Ore Separation and Blast Furnace Ironmaking
Soon, with the help of the old butler Pedro, Li Wei legitimately gained control of the three baronies of Tangquan, Yinsong, and Limestone.
Mr. Li Wei, who was ready to do something big, couldn't wait to organize his people to go to the Gray Rock Territory. He wanted to take over the iron mines and ironmaking workshops in the Gray Stone Territory as soon as possible, make it bigger and stronger, and create greater glory!
When Levi arrived at the ironmaking workshop, production had begun to gradually resume under the arrangements of the old butler Pedro. But looking at the impressive work efficiency of this small workshop, Li Wei's heart dropped.
It’s really frustrating!
From the beginning of the crushing ore, it seemed very stretched.
Several workers used hammers to smash the larger ores into small pieces. There were several heavy-duty Sharma horses in the workshop that pulled the rollers to continue crushing the small pieces of ore.
Then the obtained ore is crushed and not beneficiated, and is directly used for iron smelting.
The iron-making furnaces were small clay furnaces over one meter high, and there were quite a few of them. Li Wei saw about twenty or thirty of them at a glance. Two or three people burning this kind of stove for a day can only produce seven or eight kilograms of low-quality iron blocks.
The produced iron blocks also need to be forged repeatedly by blacksmiths to eliminate holes and impurities in the iron blocks before usable iron can be obtained.
"Is the productivity of the Hisoka plane so backward? Such an iron-making workshop can actually support half of the barony!"
Levi now feels that there is room for improvement everywhere in this workshop.
First of all, many production links in this workshop require a large amount of labor, but many of these labor-consuming links are very simple to operate.
Typically, in the ore crushing process, Li Wei believes that water-powered forging hammers can be used instead of manpower and energy storage.
The Musta River has abundant flow and only has a freezing period of three months each year, making it possible to set up various hydraulic workshops along the river.
With the assistance of hydraulic forging hammers, it is absolutely not a problem to increase the efficiency of crushing and forging by 5, 6, 7, or 8 times.
Then the mineral processing work here is too rough.
Li Wei learned that in fact, Limestone Ling Ironmaking also had ore beneficiation, but it was selected during the ore mining process.
Miners will select some ores with better quality and send them to the iron-making workshops, while other ores with poorer quality but also containing iron will be discarded directly.
Levi just wanted to say: "Waste!"
As a wizard, Levi could easily buy or directly synthesize strong magnets, a commonly used witchcraft research material.
Ordinary magnets cannot be used for magnetic beneficiation, but strong magnets can suck out the iron oxide in the limonite ore powder.
In this way, the proportion of ore available in the mine will be greatly increased. Those ores that did not meet the standard in the past can still be smelted after being crushed and then magnetically separated.
The small furnace for making iron also left Li Wei speechless.
If the steel market in the north of the kingdom is a giant beast, then the iron produced by these furnaces every day is not even sesame, and it is not qualified to fit into the teeth of the giant beast.
How many kilograms of iron per day can a furnace do?
play house?
Li Wei made up his mind to repair the blast furnace.
First set a small goal, build a small blast furnace five to six meters high, and produce hundreds of kilograms of honeycomb iron at a time.
The one-meter-tall stove was simply too humiliating for a time traveler. If word spread, people who didn't know would think that Li Wei was a loser!
Just do it! Li Wei first stopped the iron-making workshop, which was extremely inefficient, and then arranged for the craftsmen to follow his instructions.
First he asked several workers to further grind the ore into fine powder. Then he called a group of people to build a blast furnace using yellow mud, straw, quartz sand and other materials according to his ideas.
Afterwards, Li Wei asked several old blacksmiths to build a roller. At the same time, Li Wei himself was not idle and synthesized a bunch of strong magnets.
The magnetic mineral separation test has begun.
Levi fixed a strong magnet on the inside of the drum, poured crushed ore into the top of the front side of the drum, and turned the drum.
Ore fines with a high iron content adhere to the surface of the drum, while useless slag falls straight to the ground. When the ore fragments attached to the drum pass behind the drum, they will be scraped off the drum by the scraper and fall into the container prepared in advance.
Looking at the baskets of extremely pure mineral powder that were quickly sorted out, the old blacksmith's jaw almost dropped to the ground.
In his impression, the aristocratic men of the graystone collar would only point fingers in the workshop and put forward some unrealistic demands.
Then the stewards of the workshop deducted the wages of the craftsmen on the grounds that the craftsmen were stupid and lazy and failed to fulfill the hundreds of millions of requirements set by the master.
Therefore, the craftsmen in the workshop were naturally indifferent to Li Wei, the baron from the Black Mountain Territory next door. In the simple understanding of the craftsmen, there is nothing good about the noble master!
After Baron Levi came to the iron-making workshop in the Gray Stone Territory, he started to point fingers and mess around in the name of innovation just as the craftsmen expected.
The workers originally thought that they would have to clean up the mess after the noble man had fun.
After all, the decline in workshop efficiency is definitely not caused by the aristocratic lords messing around. It must be caused by the laziness of the craftsmen. The unlucky ones will still be the craftsmen.
Unexpectedly, Baron Levi, who looks just like other nobles, seems to have done nothing wrong. At least this box of extremely pure mineral powder shows that Mr. Levi still has something.
"Lord Baron, you are truly a knowledgeable and wise man. For so many years, our workshop has been using ordinary crushed ore, and the iron we produced has to be repeatedly forged for a day or two. This frame of crushed iron ore is of very high purity. , we will definitely be able to smelt good iron!" Karl Lau, the head craftsman of this iron-making workshop, couldn't help but admire.
"Haha, where are you? In the future, the output and quality of this workshop will definitely exceed your imagination."
In Li Wei's vision, this magnetic mineral separation is just an appetizer, a real large blast furnace, hydraulic forging hammer Things like this are a powerful tool to improve the output and quality of steel in the limestone collar.
"You go ahead and use the old method to smelt these baskets of ore powder into iron. I want to see the smelting effect of high-purity ore powder. Others and I will build the blast furnace."
Regarding the blast furnace, Levi In fact, I don’t know much.
As far as he knew, Blue Star had a relatively complete and mature blast furnace ironmaking method during the Han Dynasty.
When constructing a blast furnace, in order to comprehensively consider toughness, insulation, heat resistance and other characteristics, the furnace wall will adopt a composite structure.
The innermost furnace wall is mainly made of quartz sand, which has better heat resistance and insulation effects. The outer layer is made of straw and yellow mud to prevent the furnace wall from cracking due to thermal expansion and contraction during heating and cooling.
Of course, it would be better if there are refractory bricks. The refractory bricks are placed in the middle layer to take into account the characteristics of heat resistance, insulation, and solidity. Unfortunately, there is no such thing as refractory bricks in the Xisuo plane.
Therefore, Li Wei could only build some monkey blast furnaces, and refractory bricks could only be built later when time and financial resources were sufficient.
(End of chapter)