The next morning, Liu Li, clutching her well-worn Russian documents and notebook filled with sketches, waited anxiously at the cafeteria entrance. Seeing Fu Jingchen emerge with his lunchbox, she quickly ran to greet him.
"Jingchen!" Her voice was urgent as she handed over the rolled-up documents. "That's all. There are a few key parts I just can't figure out. Could you take a look at them for me?"
Fu Jingchen took the documents and glanced at the dark circles under her eyes, knowing she must have stayed up late again last night. "Don't rush, eat first, we can talk while we eat."
The two found a table in a corner and sat down. Fu Jingchen pushed the steamed buns in front of Liu Li, then opened the few pages of Russian documents. He read quickly, his fingers tracing over complex terms and formulas, his brows furrowing slightly.
“Hmm… here,” he pointed to a spot that Liu Li had circled heavily, “this term doesn’t refer to a regular clamp; a more accurate translation would be ‘prestressed controllable clamping device.’ The formula that follows describes the approximate relationship between the applied prestress and the expected deformation compensation…”
Liu Li quickly opened her notebook, leaned over to look, and took notes rapidly while listening. "Right, right, that's where I'm stuck! How exactly is this 'prestressing' applied? How is its magnitude controlled?"
Fu Jingchen flipped through a few more pages, carefully analyzing the context and diagrams: "Look at this diagram. This device seems to apply controllable pressure simultaneously in the radial and axial directions using a set of adjustable screws and elastic elements... In principle, it's somewhat similar to the temperature difference method we discussed before, which controls deformation, but this is purely mechanical and more direct..."
One spoke earnestly, the other listened attentively. Liu Li would occasionally raise similar problems she had encountered in practice, while Fu Jingchen would explain the underlying mechanical principles from a theoretical perspective. The two leaned closer and closer, their voices lowered, completely forgetting the people coming and going around them at the restaurant.
"I understand!" Liu Li's eyes lit up as she pointed at the sketch with her pen. "It means we can design a similar tooling to proactively 'bend' the part before finishing it, causing it to undergo a slight deformation opposite to the cutting deformation. After machining, once the force is removed, the part springs back on its own, perfectly canceling out the machining deformation!"
“In principle, it is entirely possible!” Fu Jingchen also seemed very excited. “This idea is ingenious, breaking away from the framework of simply improving machine tool precision or improving materials. However…” He paused, pointing to a complex mathematical derivation in the document, “In practice, the calculation and application of this prestressing requires very high precision, and it requires very precise design and control.”
“Accuracy isn’t a problem,” Liu Li said confidently. “As long as the principle is right, we can figure out a way! We can even build a simple model to verify it first!”
For the next few nights, the two would get together whenever they had free time. Sometimes it was in the small meeting room where Fu Jingchen and his team were divided, and sometimes it was in a quiet corner of the library. Liu Li would bring her real-life cases and questions she had encountered at the Red Star Factory, while Fu Jingchen would focus on studying the difficult Russian theories and calculation formulas.
Under the desk lamp, the table was covered with papers, densely covered with notes, calculations, and constantly revised sketches. When encountering parts that were difficult to understand, Fu Jingchen would stop and try to explain them to Liu Li in simple terms; Liu Li, in turn, would draw on her own hands-on experience to raise some problems that might be encountered in actual operation, which in turn helped Fu Jingchen to revise the theoretical model.
“If we calculate according to the formula, the force applied in this area is quite large. I’m worried that the thin-walled component will be crushed.” Liu Li pointed to a spot on the drawing and frowned.
“That makes sense,” Fu Jingchen pondered for a moment, “Then we need to consider applying the force in stages, or optimizing the distribution of the application points to avoid stress concentration. Let me calculate it again…”
The clash of ideas gradually clarified and made the initially vague concepts more feasible. Those few pages of seemingly insignificant old documents, through the joint efforts of the two, slowly revealed their immense potential value.
As Liu Li looked at the increasingly refined design ideas on the paper, the initial uncertainty and excitement in her heart gradually settled into a solid anticipation. This time, she wasn't exploring alone.
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