Chapter 313 - 174: Material_4

Chapter 313: Chapter 174: Material_4

In the first second, the pointer trembled slightly. It was the release of surface stress as the base’s outer shell first heated up.

Zhao Peng’s heart was in his throat.

The second second.

The third second.

The seconds ticked by.

The heat gun had been blowing continuously for a full minute.

The steel pipe on the outside of the base was too hot to touch.

But.

A miracle happened.

The red pointer on the dial indicator.

After that initial, slight tremble, it was as if it had been welded fast to the dial.

It remained firmly at a minuscule position just to the right of the zero mark, locked dead-on to a precision of five decimal places.

No matter how Zheng Nan changed the angle of the heat gun, no matter how sharply the surrounding temperature rose.

That pointer didn’t move in the slightest.

Steady as a rock.

The only sound left in the workshop was the whining roar of the heat gun.

Zhao Peng’s jaw slowly dropped.

Zheng Nan’s hand, still gripping the heat gun, froze in place. He forgot to turn it off.

"This... How is this possible?"

Zhao Peng took a sharp step forward, his face nearly pressing against the glass cover of the dial indicator.

He couldn’t believe his eyes.

He turned to look at Wang Dayong, who was drenched in sweat and whose clothes smelled of scorched welding flux. Zhao Peng’s voice cracked.

"You didn’t even write out a differential equation! You didn’t calculate a compensation matrix for the thermal expansion coefficients! How could you possibly have canceled out their different expansion rates so perfectly with manual cutting?!"

It was like someone firing a shot from the hip, without a scope, and hitting a fly from eight hundred meters away.

In the eyes of a theorist, this was nothing short of an affront to the dignity of physics.

Wang Dayong looked at his two dumbfounded seniors.

He walked over and switched off the heat gun in Zheng Nan’s hand.

The workshop fell silent.

Wang Dayong pulled the towel from around his neck, wiped away his sweat, and broke into a brilliant, unassuming grin.

"What’s there to write an equation for, senior?"

Wang Dayong walked over to the still-scalding base, held out his hands, and began gesturing in mid-air.

"The books say it: aluminum expands quickly, steel expands slowly."

Wang Dayong pointed to the outer steel pipe.

"This outer steel pipe—I welded it fast at the bottom. When you blast it with the heat gun, it heats up and expands. It has to expand upward, right?"

Zhao Peng nodded subconsciously.

"As it expands upward, it pulls the aluminum rod welded to the top along with it."

Wang Dayong made an upward pulling motion with his hand.

Then, he pointed with his other hand to the aluminum rod hidden inside.

"But!"

"The aluminum rod inside gets hot, too. And aluminum is more temperamental than steel—it expands faster. As it expands, it has to lengthen downward."

Wang Dayong held his hands in front of his chest.

His right hand represented the upward pull of the steel pipe, and his left, the downward stretch of the aluminum rod.

He slammed his hands together, mimicking two forces wrestling with each other.

"When I was cutting the aluminum rod, I measured it. The coefficient of expansion for aluminum is about double that of steel. So, I just had to cut the inner aluminum rod to half the length of the outer steel pipe."

Looking at Zhao Peng and Zheng Nan, Wang Dayong used the simplest, plainest language to reveal the secret behind his ingenious mechanical contraption.

"The outer steel pipe expands upward by one millimeter. The inner aluminum rod expands downward by exactly one millimeter."

"One pulls back, the other pushes out."

"As long as the two materials are fighting each other in there, canceling each other out, the internal stresses form a closed loop."

Wang Dayong pointed to the flange at the bottom of the aluminum rod, the part connected to the dial indicator’s probe.

"So, no matter how much they swell up or how fiercely they fight in there, the actual load-bearing connection point on the outer frame, right here at the bottom, is locked firmly in place by those two opposing forces."

"They can expand all they want inside, but the outside won’t move by even a single micron!"

As Wang Dayong finished speaking, Zhao Peng and Zheng Nan stood there for a long time, staring at the ugly, crude, yet utterly dependable nested base.

Built with pure, brute-force, unadulterated physical intuition.

There were no complex mathematical derivations, no expensive special-purpose materials.

Using two scrap pipes picked from a junk pile and the most primitive cutting and welding techniques, Wang Dayong had brute-forced a "perfectly" non-expanding structure into existence in the physical world.

Zhao Peng took a deep breath.

"Dayong."

Zhao Peng’s voice was filled with sincere astonishment.

"You really are something else. No wonder you were in the special program for gifted kids. How is your brain even wired?"

Wang Dayong scratched his head sheepishly, looking a bit embarrassed.

"It’s not wired any special way. It’s just... formulas give me a headache. When I can’t figure them out by calculating, all I can do is get my hands dirty and build it."

He turned and looked at the base, which was already beginning to cool down.

He had muddled through today, solving the problem at hand with a crude method, by making two materials fight each other.

But for the first time, he felt with startling clarity:

’This kind of structural nesting is ultimately just a clever trick.’

’I can use two pipes to cancel out thermal expansion today, but what about tomorrow? What if I have to deal with temperatures of several thousand degrees? Or tens of thousands of tons of hydraulic pressure?’

’When that day comes, making a few pipes fight each other won’t be enough.’

’The ultimate, life-or-death limit of a piece of industrial equipment isn’t determined by how beautifully the blueprints are drawn.’

’It’s determined by the metal itself.’

’The materials.’

Wang Dayong looked at the base, a new, more intense craving glittering in his eyes.

’What if, one day, I didn’t have to scrounge for scrap to piece things together?’

’What if, one day, I could personally forge a piece of iron in a furnace—a metal that’s inherently stable, that won’t expand, that won’t break no matter how you shake it... how badass would that be?’

The thought sparked in Wang Dayong’s mind, then flared into a flame.

"Let’s go, seniors."

Wang Dayong dusted off his hands and glanced at the wall clock.

"It’s time to eat. We’ll let the base cool here and show it to Teacher Liu in the morning. Let’s head to the cafeteria and grab a table. If we’re late, they’ll be out of the stewed pork ribs."

The two seniors couldn’t help but exchange a glance.

"Let’s go!"

Zhao Peng declared with a grand wave of his hand.

"The ribs are on me today! Dayong, eat your fill!"