Chapter Thirty: The Gas Workshop

Under the elevated workshop of the gas plant, on the cast reinforced concrete foundations, stood more than a dozen cylindrical gas producers. The gas producers were sealed with water jackets, and the gas pipelines were already installed on the iron supports of the elevated workshop. The gas pipelines were made of cast iron, and the joints were sealed with a mixture of water glass and crushed porcelain—this was currently their best anti-corrosion sealing material. Lin’gao’s huge demand for porcelain powder had given rise to a new industry in Guangdong and Fujian: the acquisition of broken porcelain shards. In the past, the broken and damaged porcelain from the kilns during the firing process was directly discarded. Now, there were merchants who specialized in purchasing them, packing them, and shipping them to Lin’gao. The industrial sector would then crush the broken porcelain shards into fine powder with a ball mill for later use.

The valves and flow meters were locally produced in Lin’gao, and their quality was not very guaranteed. Therefore, the entire workshop was open on all four sides to maximize ventilation and avoid accidents caused by leaks.

“What’s the problem?” Jiang Ye jumped out of the car and first glanced at the birdcage hanging at the entrance of the workshop. They had no special chemicals to add to the gas as a warning odor, so they could only use the simplest bird test method in all places with gas. The small bird inside looked lively and showed no unusual state.

“The outlet temperature of furnace number four is rising too fast!” the foreman said in a panic, handing over the work log. He used to be a kiln worker and had a unique skill: he could tell the temperature in the furnace just by looking at the color of the fire. However, since coming to Lin’gao, his skill had been replaced by industrial thermometers. Although his secret art was no longer valuable, his work experience was still useful, so he was trained to be a foreman.

Jiang Ye glanced at the work log and looked at the situation inside the furnace through the observation window. In fact, he was not very familiar with gas producers either, but he had crammed a lot of knowledge in this area.

“It should be a channeling operation,” Jiang Ye said. The so-called channeling operation meant that the ash layer inside the furnace was high on one side and low on the other, and the fire layer was also skewed. The high side was on fire and running hot, while the low side was dark and running cold. “Test the quality of the producer gas!”

A portion of the gas produced in the furnace was diverted to a special test combustion port on a branch pipe. They did not have an instrument to measure the gas content, so they had to use the simplest method of visual inspection of the combustion to roughly check the main components of the gas.

“Report! The carbon monoxide content has decreased! The carbon dioxide content has increased!” a student intern at the construction site reported loudly.

“Bring the furnace poker. Go to the top of the furnace and poke the ash!” Jiang Ye called out, and someone immediately brought over the special furnace poker. “You guys, use the hooks to pull the ash from the ash pan and get the slag out!”

Jiang Ye first poked open the accumulated high ash layer and lowered it. Then, with the ash pulling below, a lot of slag was cleaned out. Even by visual inspection, it could be seen that the carbon content in the ash was high, which indicated that his judgment of the fault was basically correct. After pulling the ash, he instructed the workers to use an iron rod to compact the material layer where the combustion was fierce, and also added some material to keep the material layer uniform.

After a while, the temperature and quality of the gas at the outlet returned to the normal range. The fault was considered to be eliminated. Jiang Ye knew that this was the simplest fault in a gas producer, but it was also the most common. The Transmigration Group used gas producers on a considerable scale, but the problem of a shortage of experienced personnel had never been solved. Even an important project like the steel plant could not get enough skilled personnel.

He looked at this group of people. Besides the foreman, no one had any experience in operating a gas producer. The training work was still a long way to go. When a problem arose, the foreman himself was at a loss.

Jiang Ye first briefly analyzed the cause of the fault, the method of handling it, and why it was handled this way. These were very simple things. As long as there was a master craftsman to guide them, a batch of skilled workers could be trained quickly. But now, the “master craftsman” himself was not very reliable.

Solving the fault was one aspect; finding the cause of the fault was another. Jiang Ye knew from the technical manual of the gas producer that there were not many factors that caused channeling. Besides coking in the furnace, it was a problem with the furnace charge. From the situation just handled, the coking in the furnace had been dealt with in a timely manner.

Jiang Ye pinched a handful of coal particles in the basket. The fuel for the gasifier was diverse. Here, they used washed coal from the coal washing plant, which was the coal powder and slack coal that had settled in the wastewater from coal washing, collected, dried, and ground.

The coal dust felt a bit damp in his hand, with too much moisture. Jiang Ye first gave the first reason in his mind.

“You see, this coal dust is too wet,” Jiang Ye opened his clenched fist, and the coal dust fell in small clumps. “The moisture content is high, so the charging will be uneven, causing the furnace charge to be uneven. So this kind of raw material must be evenly distributed in time after charging.” His eyes swept over them. “Who was in charge of charging today?”

“Me—” a worker hesitantly raised his hand.

“Why didn’t you follow the specifications in the operating manual?” Jiang Ye said sternly. “Slacking off will cause accidents! You didn’t distribute it evenly today, and a fault occurred. At the very least, it will affect production. At worst, if it’s not handled in time, it will burn through the furnace body and cause a major accident! Your own death is not worth regretting, but you will also take the lives of your fellow workers!”

The unlucky worker trembled with fear and couldn’t say a word. The phrase “your death is not worth regretting” was too powerful. If it weren’t for the fact that Lin’gao was now a “new society,” he would have already knelt down and begged for mercy.

“Deduct his work points according to the regulations!” Jiang Ye said to the foreman. “Hold a team meeting after work and help him properly.”

Besides the commune members, all the naturalized citizen workers and staff had also begun to implement the work point system. However, this form of labor remuneration was much more complex than the commune members participating in dispatched labor to obtain labor work points. The HR professionals among the Senators had already begun to formulate and implement a complex remuneration system, including the calculation of fixed wages and bonuses, additional benefits, and compulsory work injury and labor insurance. And this system was built on the calculation system of “work points.”

“Yes, yes,” the foreman nodded repeatedly.

The foreman was also docked points for failing to fulfill his supervisory responsibilities. The leadership responsibility system was in the promotion stage: since leaders received more remuneration and benefits than ordinary workers and staff, they also had to bear greater responsibility.

On his way back to the headquarters, Jiang Ye, in his busy schedule, jotted down the entire process of handling the fault in his work notebook. Then he noted that he needed to send a memorandum to the fuel management department—coal powder smaller than 10mm should not be used as gasification raw material; it was more suitable to continue making coal briquettes. There was also the issue of moisture content. It was normal for washed coal to have a high moisture content, but it should be dried for a few more days.

The overhead gas pipeline extended from the gas workshop to the open-hearth workshop. The overhead supports for the pipeline were mostly built of brick. In the middle of the brick pillars were wrought iron columns to increase the strength of the entire support. Watching the workers carrying buckets of mortar and laying bricks with trowels, Jiang Ye sighed: if there were enough steel, welded steel supports would be good, saving construction time and being sturdy. When would these days of “making do with what you have” in industry end? Steel is the backbone of industry. Without enough steel, Lin’gao’s so-called modern industrial system is like having rickets and cannot exert its full strength.

He thought of the discussion about the mixer at the technical discussion meeting of the steel complex in the previous stage. At that time, some Senators from the mechanical and metallurgical departments believed that the mixer was an important process equipment in open-hearth steelmaking and should be included in the manufacturing project. The so-called mixer was mainly used to regulate and balance the supply and demand of molten iron between the blast furnace and the converter, to ensure a continuous supply of molten iron needed by the converter. The molten iron was stored and mixed in the mixer to homogenize its composition and temperature, which was very beneficial to converter steelmaking. With a mixer, the molten pig iron from the blast furnace could be directly fed into the open-hearth furnace for steelmaking, saving the process of first casting it into ingots and then melting them in a cupola during steelmaking. This could save a large amount of fuel and fully utilize the advantages of continuous production.

However, in the actual manufacturing, the mechanical department found that there were a series of difficulties in manufacturing the key moving parts of a mixer with a capacity of 50 tons of molten iron, which also had to be able to move and tilt. In the end, it was decided to use the less economical but simpler process of smelting pig iron ingots—and to add the mixer later when the materials improved.

This problem fully exposed the bottleneck caused by the lack of materials. Jiang Ye thought that if the metallurgical department could not ensure the supply of steel of sufficient grade, it was not entirely impossible to manufacture these parts. Fortunately, the mixer was only an improved auxiliary equipment, not a decisive production equipment.

The new steelmaking workshop of the Lin’gao Steel Company no longer used the previous converter steelmaking method, also known as the Bessemer process, but adopted the more efficient Siemens-Martin steelmaking method—the open-hearth process. The open-hearth furnace was not only used in the steelmaking industry, but also in the glass industry and other smelting industries. It was a very efficient production process.

Open-hearth steelmaking is a large-scale steelmaking method that uses an open-hearth furnace with gas as fuel. Under the condition of direct heating by the combustion flame, raw materials such as pig iron, scrap steel, and high-grade iron ore are melted and refined into molten steel. In the old world, it was the main steelmaking method still in use until the 1960s. Its production efficiency and steel quality were much higher than the traditional Bessemer converter method. The basic working principle of the open-hearth furnace is heat regeneration. It does not need to build a separate heat regeneration chamber—it has one itself.

In the converter steelmaking method, the heat required for smelting comes from the smelting process itself, that is, the heat generated by the chemical reaction of the furnace charge. The open-hearth method requires heat to be supplied from the outside. Simply put, it uses efficient, controllable, and relatively clean gas fuel—coal gas.