Chapter 408 Derivatives (Part 3)
But the Dandelion project derivatives are more than just that.
As the overall person in charge of this project and also the chief engineer, Su Changli is responsible for the guide rails and electromagnetic acceleration system.
This system is not simple.
Otherwise, the USS Ford would not have remained out of service because their electromagnetic catapult technology does not meet the standards.
Su Changli is not a person with moral obsession. He directly "borrowed" the mature technology from a certain major country.
However, he did not read from the script, because the mass of the catapults of the two sides was different. The catapult mass of the Dandelion project had to start at least 500 tons, and the speed had to reach 7.8 kilometers per second. There was definitely no way to copy it directly.
His design was adjusted to a nuclear fusion furnace + resonance power generation + temperature difference power generation as the power supply system.
One feature of resonant power generation is that instantaneous power generation can surge in the manner of a nuclear explosion, which reduces the pressure on supercapacitors.
However, in this process, Su Changli discovered a problem that had been overlooked before, that is, the instantaneous high voltage and large current can easily cause the transmission system to overload or even paralyze.
This problem is very serious. If the spacecraft is accelerating and one of the power supply links suddenly fails, the spacecraft may not be able to increase its speed and then fail to fly out of the atmosphere.
To this end, he contacted major power companies and power research institutes.
After several months of hard work, they finally worked together to develop a superconductor material, an alloy material using a combination of copper, barium, lanthanum and silver, which can maintain superconducting properties at temperatures below minus 24 degrees Celsius.
Although it has not reached the level of room-temperature superconductors, it is not unusable at minus 24 degrees Celsius.
The liquid nitrogen circulating cooling system can maintain the temperature of the transmission line at minus 30 degrees Celsius. The core of the liquid nitrogen circulating cooling system is equipped with an inverse temperature difference system, which efficiently extracts the heat of the liquid nitrogen and achieves low-cost and high-efficiency refrigeration.
The properties of superconductors need no explanation.
Electric current flows in a superconductor with almost no loss.
You should know that in conventional wires or plateau cables, the current has 10-20% invalid loss, and this part of energy is wasted.
Although Homo sapiens has been promoting a power supply balance strategy, striving to supply electricity to each city and base nearby rather than carrying out long-distance transmission across regions.
But even so, the loss of electric current during transmission is still considerable.
Therefore, this alloy material has great potential.
However, the cost of this material is relatively high, which makes a number of power companies feel a bit painful.
Copper and barium are not a problem. Homo sapiens have discovered several super-large deep copper mines in the Luzon Islands and Sumatra, with total copper reserves increased to 1.28 billion tons. Barium can be extracted from seawater, which is also not a problem.
But lanthanum and silver are different.
Lanthanum is a rare metal and silver is a precious metal.
The optimal ratio is 41.3% copper, 31.2% silver, 15.8% barium and 11.7% lanthanum.
The usage of these two metals, silver and lanthanum, is too huge. Even if the underground veins discovered by Homo sapiens are taken into account, the silver reserves are only 8.37 million tons, and the lanthanum reserves are only about 72,000 tons.
Lanthanum has other uses, but the current annual output is only 600 to 700 tons, which means that this type of superconductor cable is difficult to use on a large scale.
However, some scientific research laboratories, such as the stellarator laboratory and tokamak laboratory under nuclear fusion research, need this kind of superconductor.
This material can also be used for the main transmission lines in some Class A cities.
After all, the monetary attribute of silver is not high, and the right thing to do is to expand its industrial attributes.
Anyway, the silver and lanthanum used to make superconductor cables do not disappear after use. At most, they can be recycled and reused when technology is innovated in the future.
Through the research and development of lead-tungsten-gold thermoelectric materials and copper-barium-lanthanum-silver superconducting materials, Homo sapiens also discovered that various rare metals and precious metals are becoming increasingly important in industry.
The acquisition of precious and rare metals that had been promoted before, and the regulations on bundling gold and yuan, have effectively increased the resource reserves of Homo sapiens.
But this is far from enough.
In addition to continuing to explore the local resource potential, Sapiens Company is also setting its sights on the vast Pacific Ocean, Ceylon Ocean and Southern Ocean, as well as South America, Africa and Antarctica.
The resources in these areas are not highly developed, and some are even sparsely populated. The resources contained there are tempting the Homo sapiens company to speed up its pace.
The endowment of natural resources plays a crucial role in the development of a force.
Take America, for example. Relying on the vast Great Plains of North America, its agricultural production potential is very strong. Even though it is now forced to continuously shrink its sphere of influence, it can still maintain itself internally.
If the Europa Union were suppressed by the Sapiens Company in this way, they would definitely not be able to hold out for a few years.
The agricultural, energy and mineral endowments of the Europa Union are average. If it loses the resource supply from its economic colonies and Russia, it will be difficult to achieve internal stability.
Even though the Europa Union has not been the No. 1 rival of Sapiens Corporation in recent years, all sorts of problems have arisen simply because it was affected by the confrontation between Sapiens Corporation and America.
Sapiens is frantically opening fully-owned branches all over the world in order to weaken the potential of its opponents' available resources and squeeze their living space.
In the future, if we want to step into the starry sky, the resources required will definitely be enormous.
Without sufficient resources, it is impossible to explore the universe.
…
Su Changli's collaboration with the power company brought about the application of low-temperature superconductors.
In addition, the subway group also contacted Su Changli, hoping to introduce electromagnetic acceleration technology and use sub-vacuum pipelines to significantly increase the speed of freight trains in the subway.
According to calculations, if new electromagnetic acceleration technology is used and sub-vacuum pipelines are used, the maximum speed of freight trains can be increased to 720 kilometers per hour.
This not only improves transportation efficiency, but also further expands the radiation range of the urban circle.
However, there are still some problems that need to be solved for super-high-speed subways, such as stopping at stations, deceleration, and coordination.
Electromagnetic acceleration combined with sub-vacuum can indeed make the speed very fast, but deceleration is a problem.
If reverse thrust braking is used, the energy consumption of braking is not small; and friction mechanical braking will cause certain damage to the track and wheels;
There is also the circular track pneumatic braking method, which is to build a special circular track as a parking station. When the high-speed train enters the circular track, the train stops accelerating, and then gradually injects air into the track, using air resistance to slow down the train.
This solution does not consume much energy, but it will increase the workload and the braking time will take more than ten minutes.
In addition, there is also a reverse electromagnetic acceleration solution, which is that when the train needs to slow down, the acceleration direction of part of the electromagnetic track is reversed to achieve the deceleration effect.
It is precisely because of these troubles that the current Homo sapiens subway has not further increased the speed of trains.
After all, the consumption caused by these transformations will reduce the cost-effectiveness of ultra-high-speed trains.
Ultra-high-speed trains are only useful if the train has a range of more than a thousand kilometers and hardly ever stops in between.
Otherwise, in Southeast Asia, where there is a station every ten kilometers, super-high-speed trains will have to slow down before they can accelerate to their limit, so there is no need to use super-high-speed trains.
This is why the current passenger train speed of the Sapiens company is only 150 to 250 kilometers. It is not that the speed cannot be increased, but that there is no distance to increase the speed.
