Chapter 276 The World's No. 1 Steel Production Consortium (Second update, please subscribe)
December 1868 was summer in the southern hemisphere, the harvest season and also the hottest season of the year.
Even in the middle of summer, the temperature here is only around 31 or 32 degrees Celsius. Such weather is considered extremely comfortable.
However, in front of the blast furnaces and open-hearth furnaces in the steel plant, summer is often the most difficult time. Furnace workers wearing protective clothing stuff steel pestles into the furnace, and the scorching air waves blow in their faces, burning the workers.
In the busy workshop, workers were busy, the sound of air from the blowers and the roar of the machines drowned out any other sound in the workshop, only the shrill whistle could cover it all.
After several years of development, Dahua Steel Company located on the banks of the Rio Negro River has long become the largest steel plant in the southern hemisphere. It not only has as many as six blast furnaces for ironmaking, but also three most advanced open-hearth furnaces for steelmaking. The steel production of more than 600,000 tons is enough to make Dahua Steel the leader in the world - there is no "steel consortium" larger than it in this era.
After all, most steel companies of this era are “small factories” with an annual output of tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of tons, and Dahua Steel has been aiming to become a large steel consortium from the very beginning.
From the first phase of blast furnace ironmaking to open-hearth steelmaking, the early ironworks construction had a certain emergency nature. Apart from the extremely profitable open-hearth steelmaking, there were only simple steel rolling equipment. Starting from the second phase of the project, it was a steel complex unprecedented in this time and space.
From the mining and beneficiation of iron ore and coal mines more than 100 kilometers away in the south, to iron smelting, steel smelting and steel rolling, the newly built blast furnaces and larger open hearth furnaces will not only greatly increase steel production, but the production of steel will also evolve from a few types of steel such as rails to various types of steel such as steel plates, steel beams and wire rods.
"…In the past, Nanhua only had a rolling mill in the shipyard to produce shipbuilding steel plates. We introduced a double-roller plate rolling mill to roll steel plates with a thickness of less than 2 inches. Three years ago, the United States built a three-roller Lauter medium and thick plate rolling mill, which can roll thick plates with a thickness of less than 10 inches. After receiving information provided by overseas students in the United States, we immediately introduced this rolling mill…"
International students provide information, which is the characteristic of Nanhua. Those international students are responsible for studying abroad, and they will also collect technical intelligence in related fields. These information are public, but they are scattered in various fields. It is not only slow but also ineffective for the company to collect them by itself. However, the company now has thousands of international students studying in foreign universities and interning in factories. They are equivalent to intelligence personnel in related fields, who are specifically responsible for collecting the latest information. Then the company will introduce relevant technologies in a targeted manner to improve its own technical level.
To a certain extent, those international students are intelligence personnel stationed in various places by Nanhua, but they are specifically used to collect technical intelligence.
This is one of the reasons why Nanhua has been able to develop rapidly in the past few years. International students can collect and acquire various advanced technologies in the fields they are best at, thus promoting the technological development of Nanhua.
Along with the roar of the machine, a 5-inch thick steel plate rushed out from under the rollers. The red-hot steel plate was quickly cooled down by the cooling water and the rising steam. When the steel plate was transmitted to the rear, Zhu Xianhai stood there, looking at the steel ingot without saying a word.
"Every piece of steel hides the secret of a country's rise and fall."
Who said this?
He no longer has any impression of it, but what is certain is that this sentence naturally makes sense, especially in this era, what is steel?
It's the country!
It is a symbol of the country's strength!
Only with steel can we manufacture large quantities of weapons and build warships. Steel plates like this that are 5 inches or even 10 inches thick are necessary for building battleships.
"My lord, with this rolling mill, we can continuously produce 10-inch thick steel plates. Without it, we can only use a large steam hammer to forge, which is not only slow but also costly. Using a rolling mill can not only reduce costs a lot, but also increase the speed by more than ten times. If..."
Before Li Jiebai, a naturalized French engineer, could finish his words, Zhu Xianhai said,
"If it is used to build warships, especially battleships, it can produce thick plates continuously. However, we do not need to build so many warships at the moment, but we can build merchant ships first. Iron-hulled merchant ships will definitely replace wooden-hulled merchant ships in the future. Iron-hulled ships are also the future development direction. Most of the ships of our shipping company are old ships purchased a few years ago. With this rolling mill, we can provide cheaper steel plates to produce low-cost iron-hulled ships to replace old ships..."
In fact, it’s not that Nanhua doesn’t build combat ships, nor does it lack the demand for it. The most important reason is... insufficient technology.
Although Nanhua Shipyard has built more than 27 iron-hulled ships, including both warships and merchant ships, in the past few years, the largest tonnage is only 4,000 tons. It seems that the progress is rapid, but it is still unable to build large warships!
However, we can accumulate technology by building large merchant ships. And Nanhua does have this need!
For example, coal needed to be imported from the Cape Colony. With the industrial development of South China, the demand for coal increased. The steel plant alone required millions of tons of coal every year. In the case of insufficient local production, importing from abroad became the only option.
This also means that Nanhua needs to build large ore-carrying ships, at least those of tens of thousands of tons. Not only that, from the perspective of immigration transportation, large and fast immigration ships are much more efficient than small ships.
It’s a pity that Nanhua’s shipbuilding industry’s technical strength is still too weak, and it also lacks experience!
"It looks like we need to come up with a plan to stimulate the development of the shipbuilding industry!"
On the way back to Nanhua, Zhu Xianhai talked to himself while sitting in the car.
What is the plan?
It must be a "key project", which is to concentrate human, material and financial resources to carry out "scientific research" of the "key project" so as to improve the overall industrial technology level.
For example, many of China’s “breakthroughs” in later generations have obviously improved the level of related industries.
"shipbuilding……"
Zhu Xianhai said to himself.
"We can give it a try. After all, there are no technical problems on Nanhua's side right now."
Soon, a rough idea took shape in Zhu Xianhai's mind.
(End of this chapter)
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