Although the fire in the boiler was extinguished, the pressure inside the boiler was still there, so the large amount of steam did not dissipate immediately. After half an hour, the steam inside the boiler cooled down, and only Zhao Fuxiang and others could see clearly what the steam chamber looked like.

From the outside, the steam room looks normal, but when you walk inside, it's different. A big hole is blown out of the steam turbine shell in the middle, and the iron bearing has also moved, creating a hole in the brick wall.

Zhao Zhikuan stepped forward and looked at the impeller. The three sets of blades inside were basically broken. Zhao Fuxiang picked up a fragment, looked at it, and asked: "Dad, what's going on?"

Zhao Fuxiang looked at the sawdust densely planted on the wall and said with lingering fear: "Fortunately, these leaves are made of wood. If they were made of iron, there would be big problems!"

Zhao Zhikuan also picked up a fragment and looked at it, and then said: "Looking at the cracks, it shouldn't be a problem with the material. You can see that even the thickest root of the blade has cracked. It must have been too fast!"

At the same time, Zhao Zhikuan thought of the sharp whistle sound just now and said: "The whistle sound just now should be caused by the bearing rotating too fast and the tip of the blade exceeding the speed of sound!"

Zhao Fuxiang, who knew nothing about supersonics, asked: "Dad, what should we do? Now that the steam engine has reached this point, should we settle for the next best thing and build a Watt steam engine?"

Zhao Zhikuan did not answer, but took the pen and paper from an apprentice's hand and began to calculate with flying pen.

After a simple calculation, Zhao Zhikuan took a deep breath and said: "I know where the problem lies, it's the blade!"

Zhao Zhikuan pointed to the bearing and said: "The diameter of the bearing is 5 centimeters and the blade is 1.5 meters long. If the bearing rotates 500 times per minute, the tip of the blade will reach a speed of 650 meters per second, which is already faster than the speed of sound. The sound just now was the tip of the blade.

Sent out!"

This formula is very simple. Calculate the circumference of the bearing. After calculating the circumference of the blade and knowing how many revolutions of the bearing per minute, you can quickly calculate the speed of the blade. Although Zhao Zhikuan does not know how many revolutions of the bearing, later generations of thermal power plants

Bearings can reach a speed of two thousand revolutions per minute. Could it be that this simple steam turbine built by myself cannot even reach five hundred revolutions?

Zhao Zhikuan's estimate is almost the same as the truth, but Zhao Fuxiang doesn't care where the problem is. He only cares about what to do with the steam turbine. Now he has invested more than 500 taels of silver in this steam turbine, not counting the reward just given to Xu Liu. Zhao Fuxiang is really

I don't want to see this money wasted.

"Dad, is there any solution?"

Zhao Zhikuan smiled: "Of course, you can lower the steam pressure or reduce the length of the blade by half, which can also reduce the tip speed!"

After Zhao Zhikuan finished speaking, he calculated again, and then said: "If the length of the blade is reduced to 0.5 meters, the speed of the blade tip can reach 300 meters per second, which is not supersonic, so that the blade can withstand the pressure of rotation.

!”

Zhao Zhikuan had not grasped the crux of the problem at this time. The blade fracture was due to resonance, which had nothing to do with supersonic speed. The speed of the blade tip of later generations of steam turbines could reach two or three times the speed of sound, and no such fracture was seen. But reducing the speed can indeed

Resonance can be alleviated, but the power will be lost. However, adding two sets of blades can also solve the problem of power loss. Then the bearings and shell must be redesigned, and there is really no time.

Zhao Fuxiang thought for a while and asked: "Dad, do you have any spare parts?"

Zhao Zhikuan nodded: "Of course, a lot of blades were prepared at that time, just for fear of failure of the experiment. Are you going to reduce the length of the blades?"

Zhao Fuxiang summed it up: "Dad, the sugar factory really needs a steam engine, and the bricks here also need to be mass-produced. If it doesn't work, just use it as an emergency for now and improve it later!"

It's already mid-February, and Chongzhen is about to hang himself in half a month. He is still working hard on whether he can mass-produce bricks. The progress is too slow. Zhao Fuxiang can't care about the energy loss now, as long as he has this brick in front of him.

As long as the steam turbine works, we’ll talk about the rest later!

Now that Zhao Fuxiang has decided to make do with it, Zhao Zhikuan no longer thinks about modifying the boiler. He quickly calls on his apprentices to replace the damaged blades with good ones. At the same time, he repairs the big holes in the shell with wooden boards and uses tung oil in the gaps.

Plaster was added to seal the leak.

Because the main structure was not damaged, the steam turbine was quickly repaired as before. However, the two sets of moving wheels were reduced to only 0.5 meters long, so that there was a gap between the moving wheel and the shell, and the high-pressure steam would run away along the gap. Although it was obvious that

I know this will cause a loss of motivation, but I have no choice but to wait and find a way to make up for it later.

The second time it was ignited quickly, Zhao Zhikuan and Zhao Fuxiang, the father and son, also hid far away. Xu Liu, who was newly promoted to the workshop director, took charge in front of the boiler. Under Xu Liu's command, the boiler was ignited, and soon the steam re-entered the steam room through the pipe.

This time it was a success. There was no strange sound after entering the steam room. After the steam turbine ran smoothly for ten minutes, Zhao Fuxiang sent someone in to check. The steam turbine was normal, but there was too much steam in the room and the temperature was very hot.

In a normal steam turbine, after the steam passes through the last set of impellers, the temperature will drop to room temperature, so there will be no loss of power. Now the room is full of steam, and the temperature is over 40 degrees, which naturally means a loss of power.

Zhao Fuxiang and Zhao Zhikuan, father and son, did not enter the house. They stood outside and watched for a while. Except for some noise, everything about the big guy inside was normal. There was nothing that could be done about the noise. After all, the bearings were made by hand. It would be good if they could keep running.

Now, why are we talking about noise or not?

The father and son were very happy to see the success of the steam turbine. Zhao Zhikuan led his apprentice to connect the flywheel prepared outside to the rapidly rotating bearing. In this way, the rotation of the flywheel perfectly transformed the power into a reciprocating force.

The turbine bearings rotated very fast. Zhao Fuxiang stood in the distance and looked at it. He estimated that it was two to three hundred revolutions per minute. If such a high speed was directly connected to the flywheel, it would immediately cause damage to the flywheel. So Zhao Zhikuan had already done this.

The transmission gearbox is half a meter high. Inside are two gears made of pig iron. These two gears took Zhao Zhikuan several days of hard work and even handed over the involute theory to later generations.

Blacksmith Wang has just come up with such a simple gearbox.

One end of the gearbox is connected to the steam turbine bearing, and riveting is used to fix the gear on the bearing. If the steam turbine rotates at 300 rpm at this time, and you want the flywheel to reach a speed of 30 rpm, you can know from the formula: reduction ratio = input speed ÷

Output the speed and bring in the data to get the reduction ratio of 10. With the reduction ratio, it is easy to handle. The calculation formula of the gear reduction ratio is: reduction ratio = diameter of the driven wheel ÷ diameter of the driving wheel, so the diameter of the driven wheel must be the diameter of the driving wheel.

Only ten times of the speed can reach the point where the reduction ratio is 10.

In order to facilitate manufacturing, the diameter of the driving wheel is made very large, but it cannot exceed too much. After all, the diameter of the driven wheel is ten times that of the driving wheel. Large iron parts cannot be made now. Therefore, after the joint efforts of Zhao Zhikuan and Wang Blacksmith

, the diameter of the driving wheel is set at five centimeters, and the number of teeth is 25. The diameter of the driven wheel is 50 centimeters, and the number of teeth is 250, which is ten times that of the driving wheel.

When the worker operated the driven wheel to connect the driving wheel, an unpleasant sound came from the gear box. Fortunately, Blacksmith Wang's skills were good. Although a few teeth were knocked out, it did not affect the use. The gear connection drives the outside

The flywheel began to rotate, and Zhao Zhikuan was as happy as a child when he saw the steam turbine that he had finally succeeded in after half a month.

Seeing that his father was happy, Zhao Fuxiang was also very happy and directly rewarded each of Zhao Zhikuan's apprentices one tael of silver and each of the workers five taels of silver.

Zhao Zhikuan said happily: "Son, do you know? After my calculation, this steam turbine can provide about 120 horsepower. The conversion success rate is 88 kilowatt hours, which is 88 kilowatt hours of electricity. This is the power generation in one minute. Conversion

One day, it is enough to power a town of a thousand people! If it is improved, I am confident that the power can be doubled, so that there will be no problem in driving three brick-making machines."

Later, Zhao Fuxiang's Volkswagen sedan had 160 horsepower. Unexpectedly, the big guy in front of him was not as powerful as his own sedan. Zhao Fuxiang couldn't help but feel a little contempt in his heart. However, seeing that his father was so happy, he still followed the old man's wishes and paid a few compliments.

sentence.

"Dad is so awesome! Can we charge our mobile phones and computers now?"

All the electrical appliances brought by the Zhao family have run out of power, and the car's gasoline has been used up half a month ago. Although everyone has become accustomed to the life of the Ming Dynasty, they are still eager to use electricity.

Zhao Zhikuan laughed and said: "Those electrical appliances are nothing. When you have time, I will remove the generator from the car and use the copper wire inside to make a DC generator. It will be easy to provide electricity for the entire Baisha Village, let alone

Talking about those electrical appliances!”

Zhao Zhikuan suddenly thought of the computer. The computer has been out of power for the past half month, and all calculations need to be done by himself. Although Zhao Zhikuan has a solid foundation, he has long forgotten those formulas after retiring for so many years, and some formulas need to be recalculated little by little.

If the computer has electricity, you can look up the formula immediately and get the result immediately. It is much more convenient than now.

Seeing that the old man was happy, Zhao Fuxiang took the opportunity to say: "Dad, can you take some time to build a boiler? The sugar factory uses firewood to boil sugar, not to mention it is too slow and consumes fuel. It will be different if there is high-pressure steam."

, you can quickly dry the sugar with steam and there will be no loss!”

The success of the steam turbine made Zhao Zhikuan very excited. He nodded and said: "No problem, the first boiler happens to have some defects. I will start designing the second one tomorrow and can give you the finished product in ten days! But I don't have enough pig iron. You

We also need to purchase pig iron!”

Zhao Fuxiang nodded happily and asked, "Dad, how much pig iron do you need?"

Zhao Zhikuan thought for a while and said: "Let's get fifty tons first!"
Chapter completed!