Page 27 - Stanochny park

HISTORY

From this, the blowing turned out to be smoother.
The bellows were connected to the blast furnace by means of tubes
- nozzles, as engineers now call them. Inside the furnace, the
nozzles penetrated through a hole in its wall - a tuyere. The tuyere
at the blast-furnace was alone, and the bellows were crowded
around it. In this form, blowers have existed for a very long time,
for centuries.
An important event in the history of the blower was the
invention of wooden bellows. At first, wooden bellows were designed
in much the same way as their predecessors, leather bellows.
Only they were made entirely of wood. The leather "bellows" was
replaced by plank walls. Both shields of the fur - both the upper and
the lower one - were supplied with such walls, so that in general
the wooden bellows looked like two wedge-shaped boxes that fit
tightly into each other. By swinging one drawer around the hinge,
the air trapped inside the bellows could be forced out.
Some time later, another design of wooden bellows appeared - the
so-called box bellows. They really consisted of two rectangular
boxes, inserted into one another, with open bottoms towards them.
These bellows worked no longer by rocking one half, but by simply
sliding one of the drawers in and out.
The new bellows had serious advantages. They could be
made very large, while the size of leather bellows was limited by
the size of the skins, from which the "bellows" was prepared. More
importantly, the wooden bellows developed more pressure, because
they could be squeezed with such force that the leather bellows Old drawing of the Ural blast
furnace section.
would burst.
When box bellows settled in the neighborhood of the blast
furnace, it became easier for the huge furnace to "breathe", as if it had acquired new mighty
lungs. The blast furnace was able to grow. But still the tuyere, this kind of windpipe, it had one.
And this prevented the oven from growing even more. Through one tuyere it is as difficult to
evenly saturate the huge belly of a blast furnace with air, as it is to ventilate a theater hall with
one window.
New opportunities opened up for the blast furnace after the two-tuyere blast system
invented by the Russian metallurgist Grigory Makhotin. The blast furnace, figuratively speaking,
received a second "windpipe" through which it was able to
inhale additional portions of air. The most important thing in this
invention was that the blast jets now entered the furnace from
both sides.
Air became easier to penetrate into all corners of the blast
furnace. There were fewer "stagnant" areas in it, where the
process of metal recovery was sluggish. The process of smelting
metal, as they say, the blast furnace, not only accelerated, but
also became smoother. The path indicated by Makhotin was
successful. Over the two hundred years that have passed since
the days of Mahotkna, the number of tuyeres feeding the blast
furnace with air has increased to eight, ten, and even sixteen.
Makhotin’s invention, as we can see, helped to create a plentiful,
more uniform blow. But the metallurgists were faced with
another task: it was necessary to increase the pressure of the
air pumped into the blast furnace. This would make it possible
to build even taller, more efficient ovens.
The "light" blast furnaces still served as box bellows, and
due to their imperfect design, they could not produce such a
high pressure blowing, which is necessary for very high blast
furnaces. These bellows, which once breathed strength into the
blast furnace for new growth, by the middle of the 18th century
The title page of G. Makhotin’s book
on metallurgical production. had already become fetters that retard the growth of the furnace.

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