Chapter 84: Owning a World

The 666th attempt at synthesizing silicon-aluminum alloy had failed!

Du Qiu sighed, his fingers habitually massaging his temples as he looked at the performance indicators of the end product and shook his head.

After Xue Ningmei’s visit, Du Qiu plunged back into experiments with new materials, and more than a week had swiftly passed.

The timely arrival of the titanium alloy rotor allowed Du Qiu to successfully produce a high-speed centrifuge, and after loading a unified magnetic field generator, the initial operation achieved the anticipated results.

Thus, Du Qiu began the substantive development process of silicon-aluminum alloy.

Du Qiu directly purchased industrial pure aluminum and high-purity polycrystalline silicon as substitutes for the primary refined separation products from his dream.

In doing so, he bypassed the essential super micro magnetic field module in the primary refining separation program.

With sufficiently high-purity raw materials, he proceeded directly with the intermediate purification separation program; following its completion, the synthesis program of both products commenced.

However, science is never smooth sailing.

Du Qiu’s experiments failed time and again, with the performance of the synthesized product never reaching the anticipated index numbers.

Especially at the start, the performance indicators for the synthesized products weren’t even one percent of the expected benchmarks—a complete failure.

Yet, Du Qiu was not discouraged, as the entire process largely mimicked the production program of a super machine in his dreams.

He merely skipped the primary refining process by using the high-purity raw materials produced by Blue Star’s manufacturing technology to substitute for the primary refining product.

Due to the continual experimental failures, Du Qiu spent all his time in his nightly dreams studying the synthesis program of this alloy material and the primary and intermediate refining programs of the two elements.

With this relentless day and night, reality and dreams contrasting, he gradually matched the two elemental materials with their counterparts in the dream.

Now, after 666 experiments, although he had failed yet again, Du Qiu proficiently observed the two raw materials under the scanning tunneling microscope once more.

Thanks to the timely arrival of the scanning tunneling microscope, Du Qiu could carefully inspect and compare the industrial pure aluminum and polycrystalline silicon materials from Blue Star with the primary refining products in his dreams.

This allowed him to identify the differences between them, gradually eradicating these disparities to perfectly match the primary refined products from his dreams.

He had a premonition that he was on the verge of success.

Unexpectedly, he failed again, leaving Du Qiu perplexed and baffled, as the pure aluminum and polycrystalline silicon had been perfectly matched with the primary refinement products.

Why then, after the intermediate purification and synthesis processes, were they still unable to meet the expected standards?

Although the current silicon-aluminum alloy in his hands had the same properties as steel, this was not sufficient.

A material with mere steel properties but with a cost 20% higher than steel—who would use such a thing?

After pondering for a while, Du Qiu decided to start comparing from the intermediate refined product.

Although he had compared it before, he had not focused much on the differences in the intermediate product since it differed from the primary product.

After spending time on careful comparison, Du Qiu finally discovered the cause.

The polycrystalline silicon was fine.

The problem lay with the pure aluminum.

The pure aluminum reached the standard of primary refined product after Du Qiu treated it with six catalysts and two molecular exchange agents.

However, the intermediate purification process still required three catalysts and three molecular exchange agents.

Du Qiu noticed that although he strictly followed the dream’s intermediate purification process, one particular molecular exchange agent failed to completely swap out a certain impurity.

This caused the residue of the impurity in the pure aluminum, which was why the silicon-aluminum alloy could not achieve the desired performance.

It seemed that the actual process could not strictly follow the dream procedure; the number of treatments with corresponding molecular exchange agents needed to be increased to ensure that the impurities to be removed were entirely cleared.

As this was not a fixed procedure from the dreams, how much exchange agent was needed to swap out the corresponding impurities required Du Qiu to conduct experiment after experiment to determine a certain threshold.

The 888th silicon-aluminum alloy synthesis experiment!

Du Qiu stared at the final program, feeling somewhat nervous.

If all the benchmarks were met this time, would the synthesis program yield the new alloy material he desired?

At present, the entire production process had been automated. Once the synthetic program was completed, the reactor ended the high-temperature, high-pressure environment synthesis program.

A robotic arm opened the reactor, retrieving the content inside.

A silver-white metallic substance appeared before Du Qiu.

This wasn’t the first time Du Qiu had seen this silicon-aluminum alloy. He watched as the robotic hand transferred the metallic substance to the testing segment.

Various indicator testing devices soon started to operate.

When Du Qiu saw a series of green lights, he became elated.

At that moment, a testing report was ejected from the printer.

Du Qiu rushed over, picked it up, and carefully reviewed it.

“Ha ha ha… Success!”

The silicon-aluminum alloy had finally been born; everything from the dreams was not an illusion—it was tangible and credible.

The rock weighing on Du Qiu’s heart finally settled, and even though he had long believed everything to be credible, only at this moment did he wholly accept it.

The ten-kilogram piece of silicon-aluminum alloy before him could be used to manufacture cutting tools for machine tools.

Ever since he had observed the properties of silicon-aluminum alloy, Du Qiu considered how to process parts made of this material.

When processing titanium alloy on Blue Star, hard alloy tools and polycrystalline diamond tools are typically used, with hard alloy tools being widely prevalent due to their lower costs.

Considering that the hardness of silicon-aluminum alloy is twice that of titanium alloy and also has better high-temperature resistance,

Du Qiu decided to ‘use a spear of the same material to pierce a shield of the same material,’ creating cutting tools made from silicon-aluminum alloy to process the silicon-aluminum alloy.

Although he had this plan, Du Qiu was still contemplating how to successfully research and emulate the high-energy laser cutter from the super machine’s collection module in his dreams.

With it, high-energy lasers could be used to process parts made of silicon-aluminum alloy.

With such tools at his disposal, he wouldn’t have to worry about any hard materials that couldn’t be crushed in the crushing stage of garbage sorting.

Du Qiu had already purchased the relevant tool production equipment; originally intended for producing hard alloy tools, with modest modifications by Du Qiu, it could now produce silicon-aluminum alloy tools.

Once the silicon-aluminum alloy tools were produced, he immediately installed them in the tool magazine of a machining center.

Subsequently, the machining center processed a piece of silicon-aluminum alloy according to a pre-programmed routine.

Before long, a silver-white rotor component was created.

Seeing this rotor, Du Qiu breathed a sigh of relief—the cost of the high-speed centrifuge could finally be reduced.

Fully emulating the dream’s production process to produce various new materials would no longer be just a dream.

In the future, as soon as he found materials with decent properties in his dreams, he would be able to quickly put them into actual production.

At this moment, Du Qiu truly felt like he owned a world.

++++++++