Chapter 126 - Acid and Alkali (Part 2)

The raw lacquer collected from the lacquer tree is resistant to almost any corrosion, whether it’s water, strong acid, or strong alkali. Lin’gao doesn’t produce lacquer trees, but there are many in Guangdong. The Industrial and Energy Committee imported some, and Xu Yingjie prepared a large vat of it, adjusting it to the right consistency before soaking straw ropes in it to replace asbestos ropes and water glass. However, he also paid a price—although he wore full body protection, his hands were still “bitten by the lacquer.” His fingers swelled up, and he had to rest for several days.

Ji Situi randomly picked a jar and tried the screw-on lid. “This jar is not bad. We need to maintain long-term production. In the future, the demand for sulfuric acid, as well as nitric acid, hydrochloric acid… and other chemicals will be very large,” Ji Situi said. “I have another list of chemical equipment. You should organize people to make it as soon as possible.”

“You want more?” Xiao Bailang complained endlessly. “I haven’t had a good night’s sleep in three or four days. The ceramics factory only has a dozen or so workers, including laborers. There’s too much work!” He took the list, which had more than thirty large and small water tanks of different sizes, as well as some other ceramic items.

“You want to make so many water tanks! Are you going to make pickles?”

“It does have something to do with salt,” Ji Situi said. “They are all for engineering use. You should hurry up.”

“Then you should pay some overtime. The ceramic artisans here have been working day and night recently.”

“You can ask Wu De for overtime pay. Where would I get circulation coupons?” Ji Situi was not interested in the welfare of the natives. “Didn’t they also work day and night when they were firing kilns in Fujian? Would the kiln owner give them overtime pay?”

“You’re too black-hearted a capitalist…”

Ji Situi interrupted his complaint, “I need this urgently. Please hurry up.”

After the jars were transported back, Ji Situi set up a thatched shed next to the sulfuric acid plant and slept for a while. At night, after 12 hours had passed, he instructed people to remove all the firewood with an iron poker and then immediately organized people to load a layer of crushed stone of about the same size as the ore into the furnace. Then, he lit the firewood in the four furnace chambers.

Seeing that the fire was already large, Ji Situi instructed the workers to add high-quality Hongji anthracite coal. The fire immediately became fierce, and the entire sulfuric acid plant was ablaze with light.

“Alright, except for the people watching the furnace and adding fire, everyone else go and rest. Come back to work the morning after tomorrow!”

Seeing that he didn’t have to do anything for the time being, Ji Situi rushed to the next construction site—the caustic soda workshop.

The ammonia synthesis and combined alkali production plant could only produce soda ash. Caustic soda, which was widely used in industry, was relatively easy to produce, and the raw materials were also simple—electrolysis of salt. Not only could it produce caustic soda, but it could also produce many useful by-products, including another important chemical raw material: hydrochloric acid. This saved the trouble of installing a dedicated hydrochloric acid production line, which was the advantage of the combined chemical manufacturing method.

Even the Ministry of Light Industry had been keeping an eye on the problem of caustic soda—it was related to the two flagship products of the Ministry of Light Industry: white paper and soap. Ji Situi decided to take care of it all at once this time.

“I’ll just have to do more work since I’m capable,” Ji Situi thought as he walked towards the caustic soda workshop. Just then, a train carrying construction materials to the caustic soda plant passed by. He quickly ran a few steps and jumped on, sitting on a pile of reed mats.

“Who’s that! Don’t you want your life, jumping on a train!” someone in a safety helmet on the locomotive in front shouted.

“You call this a train?”

“What is it if not a train?” As he spoke, the train had already arrived at the construction site of the caustic soda workshop, which was under construction.

Ji Situi got off the train and saw that the person wearing a safety helmet was actually Bingfeng—it seemed that this caustic soda workshop must be a steel frame structure.

Sure enough, this caustic soda workshop was quite simple, but compared to the sulfuric acid workshop, which was still exposed to the open air, it at least had a cover—the electrolysis workshop involved electricity and could not be exposed to the wind and rain. The entire building was a frame structure of brick columns and wooden beams. Except for a few key parts with walls, the other places were all open to facilitate ventilation. The precious and fragile transformers had a separate transformer room with glass windows for easy observation.

The total area of the entire workshop was about five hundred square meters, and the ground was paved with bricks. Chang Kaishen was leading Ling Tian and a few native apprentices to install a transformer—to convert the AC power from the Bopu power station into DC power, so that it could be used for electrolysis.

Ten electrolytic cells had already been installed. Ji Situi had originally considered purchasing ready-made ones, but the weight made him give up this idea. In the end, he only purchased the core components. The cell bodies were locally made—square tanks formed by weaving steel bars and then pouring cement and yellow sand. Each tank was 1.4 meters wide, 0.8 meters wide, and 0.4 meters high. The inside of the tank was lined with ceramic tiles to prevent corrosion. A wire mesh was embedded flat in the tank at a distance of 0.1 meters from the bottom. Each tank was also equipped with a wooden lid, which was coated with wood tar and asphalt for corrosion protection.

The heavy reinforced concrete electrolytic cells were supported by a hardwood board and placed on two brick support frames at the bottom as an insulation measure.

Ji Situi checked the quality of each tank for leaks and loose tiles. He found that a layer of felt coated with wood tar and asphalt was also laid between the supports as an additional insulation measure. It was always better to be careful—a current of 400 amperes was no joke.

“Is this safe?” Ji Situi looked at this makeshift appearance and felt uneasy.

“It’s generally safe, but I can’t say it’s absolutely safe,” Ling Tian said. “You still have to be careful when using electricity. Pay attention to wearing labor protection equipment and do a good job of safety education.”

“The pressure is so heavy,” Ji Situi had already foreseen that the chemical plant would not be peaceful in the future. “Native methods kill people.”

He took another turn. The chlorine absorption tower, assembled from water tanks, had already been set up outside the house. The chlorine gas produced during electrolysis would react with the slaked lime in this tower to produce bleaching powder, which was a cheap and effective disinfectant that could be widely used.

After returning from the caustic soda workshop and resting for a while, the furnace heating work was finally about to end. At this time, everyone who had anything to do with chemical engineering had come.

“We’re going to stay up for two or three days,” Ji Situi said as he asked someone to drag out a few boxes from the shed. “These are protective suits. Distribute them to everyone first. Don’t lose them! We can’t find a single mask or a pair of goggles anywhere now!”

Ji Situi had brought a lot of various labor protection equipment for chemical use—this stuff couldn’t be replenished for a while. He had brought almost a ten-year supply of consumables.

Everyone put on a full set of protective clothing, safety goggles, and chemical masks. Then they started to work under the command of Ji Situi.

Ji Situi first closed the damper of the chimney, then pulled out the抽板 of the converter and turned on the blower. He constantly measured the temperature of each inlet with a thermometer. When the temperature at the inlet of the first converter reached 450°C, Ji Situi instructed people to open the top cover of the converter and load quartz sand and catalyst. Then he closed the top cover and sealed it with acid-proof mud—water glass was no longer a rarity with the soda ash industry, and porcelain powder was even less so, so Ji Situi did not save any at all and unhesitatingly sealed the two top covers tightly.

Seeing that he had sealed the top cover, Xu Yingjie led people to start adding crushed ore to the furnace, 20 kilograms for each furnace. Then he closed the furnace door. At the same time, he added 98% concentrated sulfuric acid from the Planning Committee’s warehouse to the absorption tower as a primer to start the acid cycle.

Ji Situi tested the concentration of sulfur dioxide at the outlet of the first converter. At this time, it was close to 70%. He knew that the production of sulfuric acid had been basically successful. After the absorption tower started the acid cycle, 1.5 liters of acid were sprayed every ten seconds. The tower temperature had risen to 60°C, and he instructed people to turn on the water cooling.

In this way, ore was added to one furnace every hour, and the four furnaces were cyclically fed and slagged. The native sulfuric acid plant was thus up and running. As long as a stable supply of materials and fire was maintained, a workshop of this scale could operate for 345 days a year, producing 98% concentrated sulfuric acid.

Ji Situi and the others did not have time to cheer for this great moment. Instead, they were busy working and explaining the key points of production to the native workers—on-site observation was more intuitive than simply teaching in class and was more suitable for the cultural level of the native workers.

Of course, once it was running, it would not be stopped unless there was maintenance or other important matters—after all, heating the furnace required a long time and a large amount of fuel, which was very uneconomical.

However, Ji Situi only had a total of 20 tons of pyrite on hand. If he produced at full speed, it would be consumed in less than a month. When the pyrite would be transported again would depend on the speed of shipbuilding—but by then, the sulfuric acid from the coal coking plant should have been mass-produced. The sulfuric acid production here would not be too important. Ji Situi was already considering that if the sulfuric acid from the coal chemical plant was sufficient, then the equipment here could be used to produce ammonium sulfate from pyrite as fertilizer.

The first batch of 98% concentrated sulfuric acid was produced. It was carefully loaded into custom-made jars and sealed. Then the lid was sealed with plaster of Paris mud. A pottery basin was placed on top to protect it from the rain.

“Is this method effective?” Xu Yingjie was used to modern industrial packaging. Now, seeing the earthenware jars that looked like yellow wine jars, he felt it was incredible and had a very unreliable feeling.

“Sulfuric acid has been produced for two hundred years. Don’t worry, this is how it was packaged in the past,” Ji Situi said.

After the jars were labeled with “98% concentrated sulfuric acid,” the production date, and the production location, they were carefully packed into special wooden boxes made by the carpentry factory, one or two per box. The jars were wrapped with straw ropes in the boxes as shock absorbers. Then they were loaded onto the train and transported to the chemical hazardous materials warehouse.

After the initial victory with sulfuric acid, Ji Situi led the native workers to produce and teach for more than ten days, until the native workers had basically mastered the production process and procedures, and had memorized all the safety production regulations.