Doomsday Bunker Upgrade

It is well known that metals exist in a combined state in nature, that is, to form so-called compounds.

Only those extremely inactive metals exist in the form of elemental substances, such as gold, silver, platinum, palladium... These precious metals are also called inert metals because of their stable properties and are not easy to react with other substances.

Therefore, most of the metals that humans can obtain in nature are minerals that exist in the form of compounds, and new metal elements can only be obtained after smelting.

However, the physical properties of pure metal elements are single, and many times they cannot meet the needs of use.

For example, the well-known iron, in fact, the pure iron is very soft, and only when it is combined with carbon to form an iron-carbon alloy will it have a hard texture.

And according to the temperature, the lattice arrangement in the iron crystal is also different. According to this physical property, the iron-carbon alloy with different properties can be obtained by processing the iron-carbon alloy at different temperatures, that is, in the usual sense. What we commonly call steel.

Humans have a very long history of using alloys, which can be traced back to the ancient Babylonians more than 6,000 years ago. They were the earliest known civilizations that began to smelt bronze, that is, copper-tin alloys.

The Yan Kingdom also began to use alloys a long time ago. In the Shang Dynasty more than 3,000 years ago, the ancestors of the Yan Kingdom were already smelting and using bronze on a large scale, and they could even obtain sharpness through forging and other processing methods. sword.

The famous Yue King Goujian sword is still extremely sharp even after thousands of years, and can cut more than ten layers of paper with a single stroke.

Therefore, in human life, alloys can be said to be everywhere.

But it is still very difficult to print alloys with 3D printing.

First of all, theoretically, this can indeed be done, because the definition of an alloy is a solid product with metallic properties obtained by mixing and melting a metal with another or several metals or non-metals, cooling and solidifying.

Therefore, to use 3D printing to print alloys, theoretically, it is only necessary to mix the elemental raw materials of metals according to the required ratio, and then process them by laser to obtain the required alloys.

However, it is not easy to do this.

First of all, the mixing of metal powder must be very uniform in the overall ratio of raw materials for each sintering. Otherwise, there will be errors in the metal ratio, and there will be problems in the properties of the printed material, which will destroy the overall structure of the printed product.

Before the disaster, Blue Star already had laser 3D printing technology, and some people even printed a set of Iron Man armor in titanium metal, its performance can resist rifle fire.

But all of this is to spread metal powder in a layer of only about 0.1mm or even a few microns in a closed device, and then use a laser to sinter the area to be printed.

Repeatedly, after sintering layer by layer, the parts can be printed out.

During this process, if there is airflow disturbance, the unsintered metal powder will be blown away directly.

Not to mention the interference caused by slow efficiency and airflow disturbance, limited by the strict conditions, it is difficult to print large parts, and it is impossible to print alloys.

If only powder particles that have been processed into alloys are sintered, it is naturally very simple, but it is not so easy to process metals of different elements into alloys.

Because there is a very important factor here is the temperature.

Sintering is processing at a temperature slightly lower than the melting point of the material to bond the powder particles. However, if you want to process materials of different elements into alloys, it is obviously impossible to only rely on sintering, and the material needs to be truly melted.

And more importantly, in order to obtain some special alloys, the processing temperature is even much higher than the melting point of the material, and the temperature needs to be maintained for a certain period of time to fully change the material properties.

And these are precisely the places where 3D printing technology is difficult to achieve.

But these are not a problem for Chen Xin. The elemental metal powder particles are melted with a laser, so that different metal elements are mixed together to form an alloy, and then the alloy is cooled and sintered to become the required parts. The 3D printer he made can do it. arrive.

And the 3D printer made by Chen Xin does not print through a fixed frame and print head like traditional equipment, but looks similar to a small robot.

A small robot carries a part of the raw material, and then melts the raw material into an alloy according to a pre-designed program, and then prints it.

With enough robots, a large part can be printed very quickly.

The technique is inspired by some sci-fi games where so-called nanorobots are often used to create objects through 3D printing, a formal point Chen Xin borrows from.

It's just that he didn't make the robot so small, but made it into the style of a small drone.

After agreeing to make a small prototype for the engineering and technical personnel, Chen Xin quickly completed the prototype through the workbench and robotic arm in the shelter, and also upgraded it.

"This...this is really amazing!" The engineers and technicians looked at this small drone-like 3D printing robot and printed a miniature model of the Eiffel Tower in front of their eyes. poor.

"This is the small prototype of the 3D printing equipment I am talking about. It can be made larger or smaller according to the actual needs of use. This size is more common in various occasions." Chen Xin showed Looking at the prototype of this 3D printing equipment, he made an introduction: "It can carry about two kilograms of raw materials at a time, which can be processed alloy powders or metal powder mixtures, and can be printed online by multiple devices. , to print the large metal components needed.”

"With this, building construction will become much easier!" The engineers and technicians have already begun to imagine hundreds of such 3D printing robots starting construction at the same time, making buildings grow like bamboo shoots in the ground.

"Well, not only for building construction, but also for mechanical manufacturing and metal processing. The advantage of using 3D printing is that the printing accuracy is enough, the printed metal parts don't even need to be reworked, and no matter how weird the shape you need, For 3D printing, it can be achieved." Chen Xin looked at the excited look of the engineers and technicians and said with a smile: "For some fields that require high-precision parts, this is very useful."

It's finally restored