The Crucible Crisis

By David Barth

This story, written in 1979, was a celebration of my Father's career as a metallurgical engineer specializing in Tungsten. His career at Battelle Memorial Institute in Columbus, Ohio, spanned from 1947 through 1974, when he retired. During that time he worked on many projects including many related to national security, and he did important work on oil well drill bit facings. His opinion of this story was that it was too "far out." This story is dedicated to him: Vincent David Barth, 1910 - 1990.

It was a large pot. It was the only one of its type in the world. After all, it had been designed by one of the world's foremost metallurgists in Germany and produced by the world's second best steel fabricator: Krupp. The German metallurgist owned the world's best steel company. It was a new company, only two years old, but it had already earned a reputation for incredible quality. It was fitting that it was a German company. It was unbelievable that it had bested the world's metalurgical giants, Krupp and Mitsubishi, at their own game.

Back to the pot. It weighed 685 metric tons and could lift and pour forty cubic meters of molten metal with ease. This pot was suspended from the superstructure of the plant by a huge crane driven by four large electric motors, two for positioning the overhead crane, one for lifting the pot, and the fourth for tipping it when the spout was above the mold.

The upstart steel company was a full service producer, putting out billets, slabs, sheets, wire, pipe, anything a buyer wanted and was willing to pay for. Steel was the mainstay, but production could be set up for any other ferrous metal, and some of the nonferrous. The company was successful in great part due to its extensive research department where exotic alloys were developed.

True, many applications required only a pure metal element instead of an alloy. For this company, that was easy. It had actually cast the metallurgist's office out of solid Titanium in one pour; window, door, and ventilation openings intact. Not only that, the office was a complete, hollow six-sided cube with walls, ceiling and floor fifteen centimeters thick. The office furniture was cast out of pure tungsten, also.

All of these wonders, thanks to the brilliant design of the pot: the metallurgist's triumph. The outside of the pot was common steel. It was poured by Krupp's foundry because the metallurgist's company was new and had no casting facility that could pour the huge pot. It was a case of which came first: the chicken or the egg. Without a large crucible to pour a large casting, how do you make your first pot, without starting small and working to larger and larger castings until you have reached the size desired? In fact, Krupp had to make fourteen consecutive pours in rapid succession to fill the mold. And that was using all three of its largest crucibles ganged together.

The crisis occurred one Tuesday at three in the afternoon, four hours before the day shift was to get off. The pot was positioned in the receipt mode, below the end spouts of fifteen huge electric furnaces, arranged in circular fashion. The furnaces were tapped, the molten metal coursed its fiery path down the chutes into the pot, loading it with thirty five cubic meters of melt for this particular pour: a 2000 metric ton forge for a Japanese company.

This forge would have to be forged, of course. That task would go to the metallurgist's huge machine that was a radical departure from the everyday forge. It could press any metal with varying degrees of pressure. The workers affectionately called it "gummer" because it could mash titanium or tungsten as if they were chewing gum instead of two of the hardest elements in the periodic table.

The forge was computer controlled. The pressure could be programmed at various degrees during any operation, resulting in total control of the forging process. Some of the more esoteric forgings required varying degrees of pressure during the press in order to obtain the hardest product.

The fifteen furnaces to melt metals were the largest ever made. Not only did they exceed the capacity of any furnace built, they could heat faster and hotter. In fact, the metallurgist had designed into them a "flash" mode in which the furnaces could heat to 100,000 degrees Celsius in four seconds. The secret here was brute power, power that was unavailable anywhere in the world in such concentrated amounts. It was said, that if one of these furnaces were connected to the German power grid, when it was turned on, it would dim the lights of all of Europe.

So, power had to be generated by the metallurgist's company. Four fusion devices were the answer. Three were on line during melts, the fourth standing by to cover peak requirements. These devices used the sun's method of making heat form the fusion of hydrogen atoms. The outer case of each generator was actually a large thermocouple that fed current to the furnaces through cryogenically cooled ducts that resembled the Alaska pipeline more than a conductor of electricity.

The overhead crane lifted the pot from the circle of furnaces, and moved it to the pour station where the giant mold awaited its hot drink. In the control room, a light went on indicating activation of the motor to tip the pot's lip to the opening of the mold. Nothing happened. Lights flashed, a reset mode was indicated. The operator saw that the computer was trying again to tip the pot of molten metal. Again, nothing. An alarm sounded. The operator was on his feet, making quick adjustments at the control board, taking over command of the operation from the computer.

Now, under manual override, the tipping procedure was again initiated. Nothing. The operator's brow dripped with perspiration. He attempted four more times. He knew the dire consequences of a "no tip:" the metal in the pot would solidify into a solid mass that couldn't be poured out. He wished he could reach out of his windowed office and grab the pot and tip it himself. He felt insignificant. He reached for the red telephone. It was an open line to the metallurgist's office, car, and home. It was to be used only in emergencies. No answer. The metallurgist was not by one of his red emergency phones.

The metallurgist was an elderly man, having become an entrepreneur late in life. He jokingly compared himself to Colonel Sanders, the late multi-millionaire who had started the chicken franchises after retiring. He had put together all of his knowledge to create this magnificent steel mill, which was about to become crippled as the metal solidified in the pot.

Upon hearing the alarm sound, engineers poured from their offices into the foundry control room. They saw immediately what the problem was. The solution would not come so quickly. Each began brainstorming for an answer that would keep the crisis from occurring. A skim was forming on the metal in the pot. The color had changed from bright yellow to a brownish oxblood. Most ideas were not feasible. Those that were, would have taken too long.

The control room became an open think tank. Such brainstorming sessions were held regularly by the metallurgist, involving all engineers in small groups. Many of the great ideas had formed in such sessions. \In each case, however, the idea always seemed to come from the metallurgist, and the engineers polished and developed The metallurgist's creativity was of such magnitude that his methods had been copied by advanced nations all over the globe. The Nobel Prize commission had actually created a Nobel Prize for Metallurgy just for him, awarded one year after he started the company.

Now the surface of the metal in the pot was dark. There was no glow. It was too late to pour it. It had solidified. The entire mass, including the pot, would have to be melted down. Krupp would have to be contacted immediately for construction of a new pot. It would be difficult, if not impossible for the metallurgist's young company to live this down. Metallurgists the world over would laugh about this accident for the next century. Krupp's people would spread the word as soon as they found out. It couldn't be covered up. The pot was a solidified mass.

One engineer suggested the company build a giant lathe to ream out the inside of the pot. His idea was countered by the fact that a large pot would be needed to pour the components of this giant lathe. The chicken and the egg problem, again.

The twenty five engineers stared out the control room window at the pot. Behind them, the metallurgist, a bald, bearded man, had walked in. He observed the situation, looking over the lights on the control console. He understood what had happened. He broke the silence of the room, "Gentlemen, I see the cup of tea has turned to ice." Laughter filled the room as the men recognized the metallurgist's voice and heard his light hearted comment. He suggested to the head of the machinery department that it would be appropriate if the tipping motor could be made functional again. The department head agreed and rushed out, calling orders to the mechanics and electricians.

The staff became at ease, knowing that the metallurgist's brilliance would find a solution. They respected him to the extent that if he or anyone else couldn't develop a better idea, they would be willing to make some hard chisels and chip the steel out of the pot. The metallurgist had a better idea. In fact, he had designed the pot for this very possibility. He had been considering the entire design of the plant for many years as he sat next to the warm stove at his old home. He had originated a new alloy that had a property unknown to high temperature metallurgy. It was that alloy with which he had lined the inside of the pot. It could withstand temperatures up to 75,000 degrees Celsius, but if allowed to cool to twenty degrees Celsius, would suddenly shrink slightly. Since the foundry's ambient temperature never got down to room temperature, there was never any chance of the alloy shrinking. Shrinkage would cause little problem, in any case, because as soon as hot metal poured into the pot, the alloy would expand to its normal dimension. At one end of the foundry building, outside, was the company water works: an aeration pond, thirty five meters deep, fifty meters in diameter. It was large enough to accommodate the pot. The beams supporting the pot's crane extended out over the pond. The metallurgist had designed the water works just for this problem.

As the pot was dipped into the pond, the temperature of the pot's alloy liner dropped below 20 degrees Celsius. Then the pot was lifted over one of the furnaces and tipped, allowing the solid core to fall into the furnace. The furnace was turned on so that the alloy would melt, leaving the hollow liner laying free in the furnace. It was pulled out and re inserted into the pot. The problem was solved.

The metallurgist wearily drove home. He and his wife lived in a small cottage they purchased after immigrating from the United States several years before the birth of the plant. The metallurgist had retired from a large research institute somewhere in the Midwestern U. S. following a very distinguished career. Some said if Einstein had taken up metallurgy instead of physics, he would have been outshone by this man.