I want to be emperor

Chapter 990 Electrification

When the entire empire began to vigorously rectify the officialdom, Luo Zhixue no longer focused on it.

After all, the general rectification of the officialdom is carried out every few years, and there are even certain unspoken rules on how to do it. For Luo Zhixue, he only needs to do it among senior officials at the two levels of counselor and co-organizing minister. If the corresponding personnel arrangements are made, then there is actually nothing Luo Zhixue can do next, all he has to do is sit back and wait for the results.

After all, Luo Zhixue is the emperor, and there are many major events that he has to pay attention to every day. Although the rectification of officialdom is very important, it is only one of many major events.

In the 45th year of Chengshun, Luo Zhixue left the palace to inspect the Royal Institute of Technology, the holy land of scientific research in the Chu Empire and the birthplace of many advanced theories and technologies.

Every time Luo Zhixue goes to the Royal Institute of Technology for inspection, he actually has a clear purpose... Although the Royal Institute of Technology is located in Jinling City and is very close, it is impossible for Luo Zhixue to just go there for inspection without having anything to do.

Basically, Luo Zhixue would only run over to take a look after the Royal Institute of Technology came up with some big results.

This time is no exception!
The Royal Institute of Technology previously reported that their generator and matching electric motor projects have made great progress.

Research in the field of electromagnetism actually started very early in the Chu Empire. More than ten years ago, it had already produced a hand-operated DC generator and the corresponding DC motor, as well as the corresponding original batteries and even light bulbs. This stuff actually already exists.

This series of electromagnetic achievements were mainly used in scientific research experiments in the early days, while large-scale commercial applications were used in wired telegraphy.

The power supply of the telegraph used in the Dachu Empire today is powered by this kind of DC generator.

However, these generators and other corresponding electromagnetic equipment are still very primitive, high in cost, inconvenient to use, and many other shortcomings. For example, the navy actually purchased light bulbs for lighting and tried to use light bulbs to make searchlights for night navigation at sea. , search, comparison, etc.

But the cost is extremely high... Mainly because of the lack of technology, the previous light bulbs had a very short service life, only two to three hundred hours.

Therefore, overall, although the electromagnetic development of the Da Chu Empire is acceptable in theory, there are still some shortcomings in converting theory into products.

As for why there is a shortage...it's quite simple. Most of it is a matter of materials and processing technology.

You talk about this light bulb, researchers have also discovered that the life of the carbon filament can be longer in a vacuum environment... But the problem is that with the current vacuum technology of the Dachu Empire, it is difficult to achieve the ultimate vacuumization of the light bulb.

To put it simply, we have the theory and design of a light bulb that can be used for a long time, but you can’t build it...

Similar problems actually exist in many technology research and development projects, and they are not limited to light bulbs. Many projects have similar problems.

And these problems eventually turned into material problems!
However, the problem of materials cannot be solved with a snap of the head. It requires a large number of professional and technical personnel to conduct research and development day and night, and at the same time ensure sufficient research and development funds.

Attention, it is possible to do it!

Materials research and development does not mean that if you have the talent and funds, you will be able to do it. This thing is more metaphysical. In many cases, with sufficient personnel and funds, whether and when you can succeed depends on luck.

The material is a super sinkhole!

This is the same whether it is in the 21st century or in the contemporary Chu Empire!
The official research institutions of the Chu Empire, such as universities, the military, and research institutions directly under the Ministry of Industry, as well as a larger number of major enterprises, invest countless manpower and material resources in material research and development every year, but what can really be gained Very few.

The most famous private enterprise, Li's Steel, previously invested massive R&D funds in the field of materials for many years in order to compete with Hantian Machinery Company in the field of high-performance machine tools, and the results were certainly there...but they found themselves doing The so-called new materials that come out are similar in performance to the materials that Hantian Machinery Company launched on the market ten years ago...

Therefore, the material performance of machine tool cutting tools produced by Li's Iron Manufacturing Company is at least ten years behind that of Hantian Machinery Company. This gap is huge. What's more important is that while Li's Iron Manufacturing is engaged in R&D, Hantian's Machinery companies are also engaged in research and development, and their investment is even greater.

But there is no other way. Li's Steel can only bite the bullet and continue to fight... After all, they have been in this machine tool business for more than 20 years. Although more than [-] years have passed, they are still only the second in the industry, but to be honest, the money is not enough. No less money.

Even if it is not as profitable as Hantian Machinery Company's machine tools, as the second largest player in the industry, you can still make a lot of money if you focus on the mid- to low-end market.

You can make a lot of money by engaging in the mid- to low-end market with low profits. You can imagine how profitable the high-end machine tool market is.

This also makes Li's Steel Co., Ltd. full of expectations for the machine tool business: one day it will become the boss of the machine tool industry, and after winning the high-end market, won't it mean to make money while lying down?

Therefore, Li's Iron Manufacturing Company will not give up the machine tool business. Their company's top management has made up their mind to continue to fight with Hantian Machinery Company in the machine tool business... If it doesn't work in 20 years, it will take 30 years, or even 50 years. Sooner or later, it will happen Hantian Machinery Company will be brought down in one day.

In this process, due to the fierce competition between Li's Iron Company and Hantian Machinery Company, both parties continued to innovate at the technical level, which also made other domestic machine tool manufacturers sad...

Fortunately, the entire market is large enough, and machine tools are not a single product. In fact, even general machine tools such as general boring machines will be subdivided into many types according to the needs of different industries and companies.

At the same time, Hantian Machinery Company and Li's Iron Company, on the one hand, in order to increase their income, and on the other hand, in order to control their current competitors, they have gradually released some of their backward materials and sold them on the market in recent years.

Other machine tool or other types of mechanical equipment manufacturers can directly purchase some advanced special materials for production through these two major manufacturers.

In this way, other machine tool manufacturers can find their own living space in some subdivided general machine tool fields or non-general machine tool fields.

As for the ones that can't be found... then they're naturally closed down.

The competition between these two major enterprises has greatly improved the progress of metal materials in the Dachu Empire.

But this is still not enough for the Chu Empire!
Today, all walks of life in the Dachu Empire are developing very rapidly, and with the large-scale construction and application of telegraphs, electromagnetic-related products have entered the commercial market, which has also put forward higher requirements for technology in electromagnetic-related fields.

For example, the problem of light bulbs... Everyone knows that light bulbs are a good thing, but everyone also knows that the current light bulbs are unusable. Only the Navy's gangsters purchased a small number of sky-high price light bulbs and then made some searchlights.

As for using it as regular lighting...according to the sky-high cost and pitiful service life of contemporary light bulbs, to be honest, even the royal family would be reluctant to use them.

The purchase price of each light bulb purchased by the Imperial Navy reached more than 20 yuan, but the longest service life was only a pitiful three hundred hours... This does not include the cost of power supply.

In fact, even the Navy only equips large-tonnage battleships with light bulbs, and they are only used for searchlights, but they are not used for lighting the internal cabins of the ship.

Therefore, everyone knows that light bulbs have great market prospects, but they also know that current light bulbs are not easy to use or even unaffordable. Therefore, in addition to the Royal Institute of Technology and several electromagnetic companies directly under the Ministry of Industry, they are conducting research on light bulbs. In addition, many private enterprises are also conducting research in this field.

As for when a truly usable light bulb can be produced, it depends on the development of vacuum technology and the research and development of light bulb production technology...

The same is true in the field of generators and motors. If you want to use electricity on a large scale, you need to develop high-power generators and motors... You can't just stick to the small-scale hand-operated DC generators and corresponding motors. .Especially if you want to replace steam engines as the production power used in factories, the power output cannot be too low.

At the same time, the cost cannot be too high.

Just like when the steam engine was developed, the cost was very high at the beginning, so that it could not be promoted in many cost-sensitive industrial fields. It could only be used in mines and specific industries.

It was not until the emergence of high-pressure steam engines that factories represented by textiles actually used steam engine power on a large scale.

So don't think that the Chu Empire has developed steam engines long ago, which means that the factories of the Chu Empire also use steam engines at the same time. In fact, this is not the case.

Early low-pressure steam engines were generally used only by mining companies and a few special industries with high added value and urgent demand for power, such as heavy industries. Low-margin industries such as the textile industry did not use them.

After the high-pressure steam engine was successfully developed and introduced to the market, low-margin industries such as the textile industry began to use steam engines, which promoted the comprehensive steam engineization of industrial production, and hydropower was gradually introduced to the stage of history.

The application of electric motors also faces a series of problems such as high procurement costs and high usage costs.

If you want to use electricity on a large scale, you must first reduce the purchase cost and usage cost of this thing, so that the user company can be profitable.

This is also the main research project of the Institute of Electric Power Applications, Royal Institute of Technology.

After years of research and development and constant testing, they have developed a new type of high-power DC generator that no longer uses natural magnets but electromagnets.

After repeated improvements and tests, the generator they developed can generate power up to four kilowatts. It can use steam engines as power to generate electricity, or it can also use water power.

However, this type of generator still belongs to the category of ordinary small generators. The institute is also developing a super-large generator that can generate tens or even hundreds of kilowatts of electrical energy and then be used as a regional power supply center generator.

Luo Zhixue is very interested in their research results and the giant generators they are studying.

After all, no one in the contemporary Chu Empire knows better than Luo Zhixue what electrification means, which means the second industrial revolution.

Typical standards of the second industrial revolution are electrification and the internal combustion engine.

Let's not talk about the internal combustion engine, let's talk about electrification... After more than ten or twenty years of theory and early technology research and development, the Dachu Empire has achieved considerable results in the field of electrification.

The large-scale construction and application of wired telegraph is a typical example.

The large-scale construction and application of telegraphs also greatly promoted the development of the entire electrification industry.

Building telegraphs requires massive amounts of cables... This has promoted the development of companies related to wire R&D and production.

Telegraph also required generators, which promoted the research and development of generators and the development of manufacturing companies.

At the same time, batteries were also used on a large scale in the actual use of telegraphs, which in turn promoted the continued development of the battery industry.

It can be said that the large-scale construction and use of telegraphs not only brought progress to the empire in the field of communications, but also promoted the development of the entire electrical industry.

Without the rapid promotion and development of the telegraph industry, the research and development of new generators would not have received such great attention and received so much funding... because the market is eager to obtain more advanced, stable, efficient, and low-cost generators. Naturally, corresponding talents and funds will be invested in it.

After Luo Zhi studied at the Royal Institute of Technology, he quickly saw the generator built by the research team. This was a generator that looked very modern industrial style, full of roughness and backwardness. The power used by the generator was A steam engine.

Also as a demonstration of electricity, there is an electric motor connected by wires on the other side.

The whole process is that the steam engine burns coal, drives the generator to generate DC power, and the power drives the DC motor to do work, and then drives various other equipment.

Seeing this, some people may ask, since steam engines are used to generate electricity, why not just do it in one step and directly use steam engines as factory power.

This... in fact, in some cases it is really unnecessary, it is better to use the steam engine directly.

But that's not often the case...

Each has its own advantages and disadvantages, and each has its own uses.

First of all, the steam engine is very noisy when running, and its power transmission device is also troublesome. Therefore, if you are doing some precision machining, it is not suitable for you to have a steam engine that is constantly vibrating next to you and causing dust to fly on the ground...

Therefore, some contemporary precision machining factories have very complex power structures. Since the steam engine is shock-absorbed, a long power transmission device is required to prevent the steam engine from being too close to the processing workshop and affecting the processing accuracy.

But if you use a motor, it will be much simpler. A steam-powered generator can be placed very far away... Although direct current is still used today, and the power transmission distance is relatively short, this shortness is also compared with alternating current. However, its power transmission distance is much further than the direct power transmission system, and the two are not even on the same level.

In this way, energy is transferred through electricity, and if a generator is used at the terminal, the entire energy transfer will be very convenient.

At the same time, another point is that if a steam engine is used directly, power distribution and adjustment are very troublesome. If a steam engine wants to drive multiple mechanical equipment at the same time, it often requires a very complex transmission structure.

But after using electric energy, it doesn't have to be so troublesome at all. Just connect a few more wires and set up a few sets of generators.

The power output adjustment is also simple, just adjust the voltage and current directly.

Many advantages make electric drive have great application prospects in the field of industrial production. It can be used not only in the field of precision machining, but also in most industrial fields, and it is used very well.

This is why Luo Zhixue attaches so much importance to generators and electric motors.

This thing is an important piece of equipment that promotes the second industrial revolution and can greatly improve production efficiency.

And if production efficiency improves, then the overall social development will naturally improve, and the people's living standards will also improve.

So after seeing the demonstration, Luo Zhixue personally gave instructions. Since power equipment that can be used in large-scale industrial production has been developed, don't hide it, apply it in time, find problems during use, and solve them. Problem, realize electrified industrial production as soon as possible!
(End of this chapter)