Malachite gets its beautiful name because its color resembles the green spots on a peacock's feathers. Because of its beautiful color, it has become an ancient jade material. The chemical composition of malachite is a carbonate mineral containing copper, which has an important significance for the mining industry-it indicates copper ore.
Malachite is often closely symbiotic with azurite, an alkaline copper carbonate mineral known as azurite in ancient times. It is produced in the oxidation zone of copper deposits and is a secondary product of the oxidation of copper-containing sulfides.
Both malachite and azurite can be used as copper ores to extract copper.
Smelting pure copper from malachite and azurite requires a temperature of about a thousand degrees. Currently, the maximum temperature in the center of Big-headed Ant's special combustion chamber for making pottery can only reach a furnace temperature of seven to eight hundred degrees. This is purely an estimate, because the protagonist does not have a thermometer to measure it.
He judged it based on the fact that no natural glaze layer was produced on the surface of the fired pottery - if it was in a furnace with a temperature of one thousand degrees or above, the surface of the pottery would be easily fired to form a glaze layer.
In addition, the color of the center of the flame can also be used as a basis for judging the temperature. The temperature of the red flame is relatively low, while the temperature of the orange flame is often above a thousand degrees. The higher flame will be yellow or white. The color of the center of the flame in the combustion chamber is a relatively deep red.
If you want to smelt copper, the temperature of the existing combustion chamber is not enough, and the furnace temperature must be increased. It’s not like the protagonist doesn’t have a way to increase the temperature of the furnace.
For example, changing the fuel from ordinary firewood to charcoal requires a new charcoal combustion chamber. In the charcoal combustion chamber, cut wood or wood raw materials undergo incomplete combustion to form dark brown or black porous solid fuel. The bronzes of China's Shang Dynasty and the irons of the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods all used charcoal. It is completely feasible for the protagonist to use charcoal to smelt copper. The charcoal particles cut by ants are extremely small, and their firepower will be enhanced.
In addition, charcoal is an impure amorphous carbon that maintains the original structure of the wood and the tar remaining in the pores. Its hygroscopicity can be used to observe climate changes or reduce the humidity of the nest.
In addition to using charcoal, the protagonist can also introduce new ventilation devices.
Current combustion chambers mainly rely on natural air circulation channels composed of flues and entrances and exits. After the tanning technology matures, the protagonist can completely make a bellows to blow and pressurize the combustion chamber. Although the efficiency of this kind of air blast is not high considering the size of the ant, it still has a certain effect.
However, after raising the furnace temperature, the existing method of maintaining the fire has to be abandoned.
Now, when making pottery, ants need to constantly throw new fuel into the fire, and then the worker ants guarding the fire use long wooden sticks to constantly stir the fire to keep the fire strong.
Ants can still tolerate the temperature near a wood fire where the temperature is not too high, as long as they stay far away. But if copper is to be smelted, the ants will inevitably be unable to stay in the smelting room as the furnace temperature increases.
But without the care of ants, the small fire will quickly go out due to lack of new fuel. This is almost a dead end.
The solution that the protagonist can think of is that the new copper smelting room must be large enough, at least the size of a barrel of pure water in the human world. The smelting room is equipped with natural ventilation ducts and air blowing devices. The bottom of the smelting room should be equipped with a filter and a pipe to lead out the liquid copper to introduce the liquid copper into the mold.
At that time, the strips of charcoal and copper ore can be layered into a structure with a hole in the middle, and then left after igniting the fire, allowing the combustion chamber to work on its own.
After the drawn copper liquid is formed in the mold, it is then polished and shaped with rough stones to make the required tools, including the copper wires required by the protagonist.
Of course, these are only theoretical solutions, and there will definitely be difficulties that need to be solved in the actual process. But the protagonist is not in a hurry. It is winter now, and the ants cannot go out. The copper ore in another nest far away cannot quench their thirst, and the construction of the smelting room will have to wait until at least the beginning of spring.
Therefore, in the rest of the winter, the protagonist can slowly improve his draft.
And once you master the technology of smelting copper, it will be a huge leap forward for your own strength.
For human civilization, copper is one of the earliest metals used by humans. As early as prehistoric times, people began to mine open-pit copper mines and use the obtained copper to make weapons, tools and other utensils. The use of copper had an important impact on the progress of early human civilization. It has a far-reaching impact, marking that humans can use metals, and also marks that humans can extract chemical elements that do not exist or rarely exist in nature.
After being able to refine copper, mankind entered the age of copper and stone, also known as the age of gold and stone. This age was between the Neolithic Age and the Bronze Age, and mankind's primitive agriculture, animal husbandry, and handicrafts reached a high level. At that time, stone tools were mainly used, with a small amount of small bronze tools: the main tools and weapons were still stone tools, and stone tools continued to play a leading role in production and social life; at the same time, a varying number of metal tools with bronze as the main body appeared, using Cold forging and smelting are the two techniques used to create the artifacts, most of which are small tools and ornaments; there are also copper alloys produced due to the relatively abundant natural symbiotic mineral resources.
The reason why copper tools cannot completely replace stone tools is because copper is soft and its hardness cannot meet the requirements of production tools.
However, after copper can be refined, another important copper alloy, bronze, becomes "at your fingertips."
Bronze is the earliest alloy in the history of human metal smelting. It is an alloy with tin or lead added to copper. It has special importance and historical significance.
Compared with copper, bronze has high strength and low melting point. If bronze is smelted with 25% tin, the melting point will be reduced to 800 degrees Celsius, while the melting point of pure copper is 1083 degrees Celsius.
Once tin mines can be found, the existing pottery-firing combustion chambers in "Dongyang City" can also be used for small-scale bronze production, and there is no need to build a new smelting room.
In addition, bronze has the advantages of good castability, high hardness, strong plasticity, wear resistance, corrosion resistance, bright color, etc., and is suitable for casting various tools, weapons, etc.
Therefore, after the emergence of bronze, human civilization quickly abandoned stone tools and entered the Bronze Age.
Humans produced bronze in 3000 BC, and the earliest bronze vessels appeared in the Mesopotamia of ancient Babylon 6000 years ago. China developed bronze technology during the Longshan Period 4,500 to 4,000 years ago, which is equivalent to the legendary era of Yao, Shun, and Yu. Ancient documents record that people had begun to smelt bronze wares at that time. Archaeological excavations at the Longshan Period sites in the middle and lower reaches of the Yellow River and Yangtze River revealed bronze wares at dozens of sites.
