164: Chapter 164 Pump Module Triple Explosion, Wenbo's Cooling Solution Turns the Tide!

Alien civilization navigation timer, Day 35.

Pangu Laboratory, Level B2, Material Testing Area.

Wen Bo was squatting in front of the thermal simulation terminal, his enamel mug wedged between his feet, the water inside left untouched since morning.

The screen displayed the summary page of the seventeenth version of the cooling solution.

Seventeen red "Overheating" warnings were lined up in a row, as neat as elementary school students standing in punishment.

Liu Huaqiang's modification plan for the entanglement generator was placed to the side.

The pump laser power had been increased from 10 to the 8th power to 10 to the 12th power, an increase of a full four orders of magnitude.

What was the concept of four orders of magnitude?

A flashlight had been turned into a light cannon.

The side effect of the light cannon was heat generation.

The heat density in the core area soared to 300 watts per square centimeter.

A ground laboratory could use liquid nitrogen to suppress it, but this thing had to be stuffed into satellites and shipborne radar modules.

There is no air convection in space, so heat dissipation relies entirely on radiation.

Even with the radiation cooling fins made six times the area of the generator body, it still overheated.

Any bigger, and it wouldn't be called a radar; it would be called a radiator.

"The radiator scheme is completely dead." Wen Bo's knees cracked as he stood up.

He picked up the enamel mug, gulped down half a mouthful of cold water, and walked toward the main control console area.

Su Che was peeling peanuts with one hand while typing with the other.

Peanut shells were lined up on the right side of the desk.

The number of lines in the core code repository had been pushed from 14,000 to 26,000.

"Chief Engineer Su." Wen Bo pushed the seventeenth version of the simulation summary over.

Su Che dropped the peanut and pulled the screen over to scan the thermal map.

All seventeen thermal maps were marked red, and even the best version exceeded the safety line by 42 degrees.

He didn't comment, but switched to the Mirror World backend and pulled up the digital twin model of the entanglement generator.

"Passive radiation won't work; switch to active pump cooling."

Su Che rotated the model to a cross-section and dragged out a pipeline wireframe, wrapping it around the generator cavity three times.

"Use gallium-indium alloy as the working fluid, force circulation through microchannels, and pump the heat from the core area to the radiation panels on the deployable wings; the generator body itself won't have fins."

Wen Bo used the enamel mug to gesture the path of the pipeline.

"The thermal conductivity of gallium-indium alloy is 26 times that of water. If we push the microchannel flow rate to two meters per second, the heat exchange efficiency per unit area will increase by two orders of magnitude."

"The deployable wings can be folded for storage and deployed after entering orbit."

Su Che tossed the screenshot of the plan onto Wen Bo's terminal. "The capillary network of the self-repair module is integrated directly into the microchannels; it will patch itself if it leaks."

Wen Bo took a sip of cold water.

"Eighteenth version, simulation will be out tonight."

He turned and walked two steps, then turned back.

"I'll send the procurement list for the gallium-indium alloy directly to Lieutenant General Peng."

Su Che grunted in response, his left hand already reaching back to the pile of peanuts.

...

On the same day, at the optical group workstation on Level B2.

Academician Qian Zhenhua had three simulation terminals set up side-by-side in front of him.

The left one was running the quantum correlation optical model for cracking stealth targets, the middle one was running data aggregation, and on the right was a bowl of noodles.

The noodles were delivered by Lin Waner.

Scallion oil noodles, sprinkled with a layer of crushed peanuts.

The atmospheric penetration compensation algorithm had been completed two days ago.

The underlying logic of this technology was homologous to the atmospheric refraction correction of star sensors; by replacing the traditional Mie scattering correction coefficient with a quantum state depolarization tensor, the accumulation from previous years could be directly ported over by modifying the parameters.

Cracking stealth was the real hard nut to crack.

Correlation measurement of quantum entangled states could bypass the absorption and scattering of electromagnetic waves by the target's surface coating.

The signal photon from the entangled photon pair hits the target, and the receiving end infers the target information by measuring the quantum state changes of the idler photon.

The principle was clear, but there were pitfalls in engineering; the quantum decoherence of the signal photon after hitting the target surface was too fast.

The thermal motion of the target atoms, cosmic ray background radiation, and the target's own electromagnetic radiation were all desperately destroying the quantum correlation.

By the time the receiving end performed the correlation measurement, all it caught was noise.

Academician Qian Zhenhua had tested four schemes to extend the correlation time.

The first three were all failures.

The fourth one borrowed Academician Li Zhengyang's cosmic microwave background radiation power spectral density as the noise baseline, used frequency-domain filtering to strip away known noise sources first, and then performed correlation extraction.

The effective correlation window was stretched from 0.01 nanoseconds to 0.4 nanoseconds.

Within 0.4 nanoseconds, the femtosecond-level sampling of the quantum correlation measurement could be performed 400,000 times.

A statistical confidence of 400,000 times was enough to pull the outline of the stealth target out from the noise.

Academician Qian Zhenhua typed a line at the end of the simulation document: "Correlation window 0.4 ns, sufficient sampling, project complete."

Save.

The noodles had become soggy, but he picked up the bowl and finished them in three gulps, chewing loudly.

...

Alien civilization navigation timer, Day 36.

9:00 AM.

Academician Li Zhengyang threw the noise model document onto the public server, and the box of paper collections under the folding table was finally kicked into the corner.

"Three-layer noise separation: cosmic microwave background radiation as the noise floor, solar wind particle noise as the mid-frequency interference source, and galactic stellar radiation as the high-frequency source. Adaptive Kalman filtering locks the signal state, and quantum Bayesian estimation infers the target parameters."

He instinctively reached out to twist the lid of his thermos.

The latch didn't budge.

Ever since he switched to the new cup with a latch, this iconic action had completely lost its suspense.

"The framework is complete; the parameters are waiting for the measured signal-to-noise ratio from Dean Liu's side to be fed in and finalized." Academician Li Zhengyang carried his cup and walked over to Su Che.

Su Che was encapsulating code modules.

"Where is Dean Liu?"

Liu Huaqiang's workstation was empty, the two terminals had their screens lit, and a sticky note was stuck on the back of the chair, with scrawled handwriting: Gone to Workshop No. 3 to retrieve the third version of the pump sample.

"The first two versions burned out."

Su Che dragged an encapsulated module into the test queue.

"The MOSFET in the power control circuit of the first version broke down, and the fiber optic coupling end of the second version exploded. The third version uses Wen Bo's liquid metal cooling solution, and we're doing the full-power test today."

Academician Li Zhengyang didn't say much; he sat down in the empty chair next to him, opened his thermos, and took a sip of water.

2:40 PM.

Liu Huaqiang returned from Workshop No. 3, holding a metal block the size of a shoebox.

The surface of the block was etched with dense microchannel patterns, looking like a silver brick that had been taken for precise carving.

"The third version of the pump module." Liu Huaqiang placed the block on the test bench and connected the control cables and monitoring sensors one by one.

"Wen Bo's liquid metal cooling pipeline ran through four hours of full-power thermal cycling before leaving the factory."

He took out a lens cloth to wipe his glasses, rarely managing to wipe off all the fingerprints. "The temperature is held at 12 degrees below the safety line."

Su Che walked to the side of the test bench, and Academician Li Zhengyang and Academician Qian Zhenhua gathered over from their respective workstations.

Wen Bo squatted in front of the temperature monitoring terminal, his enamel mug resting on the floor.

"Start." Liu Huaqiang pressed the control key.

The power curve climbed from zero.

10 to the 8th power.

10 to the 9th power.

10 to the 10th power; this was the power node where the first version burned out, and the curve slid past it steadily.

10 to the 11th power; the spot where the second version exploded, and the curve shuddered for a moment.

Everyone on Level B2 held their breath.

The curve stabilized.

10 to the 12th power.

Full power.

The microchannel patterns on the surface of the metal block glowed with a faint red.

That was the residual radiation heat thrown off by the gallium-indium alloy during high-speed circulation.

No breakdown, no explosion, no sparks.

"Temperature?" Su Che asked.

"Peak in the core area, 8 degrees below the safety line." Wen Bo reported the numbers. "It's 4 degrees lower than the simulation estimate, and the actual heat exchange efficiency of the microchannels is 15% higher than the simulation, which is a pleasant surprise."

"Power output?" Su Che turned to Liu Huaqiang.

Liu Huaqiang stared at the monitoring values for three seconds.

"Entangled photon pair generation rate, 1.2 times 10 to the 12th power per second."

20% higher than the design target.

Academician Qian Zhenhua pulled a red ballpoint pen from his pocket and bit the cap in his mouth.

"That's it."

Two words, popping out of the mouth of an old man who had been struggling with optics for thirty years, were more effective than any adjective.

Su Che returned to the main control console.

He opened the parameter configuration file for the core algorithm and entered the measured value in the entangled photon pair generation rate column.

Four lines.

Core code — 30,000 lines encapsulated, main architecture in place.

Optical axis penetration and stealth cracking — Academician Qian Zhenhua has submitted.

Noise model and noise reduction framework — Academician Li Zhengyang has submitted.

Entanglement generator modification and signal processing — pump module passed, remaining Pangu OS interface docking to be finished by Liu Huaqiang tomorrow.

Su Che changed the status of the first phase from "In Progress" to "Complete" in the scheduling document.

He picked up the thermos on the table, unscrewed it, and took a sip.

Goji berry water, with just the right amount of sugar.

On the center screen of the monitoring wall, the finishing section of the Dry Dock's keel truss and the laying of the enclosed final assembly cabin shell were both progressing steadily.

Five hundred silver-gray robots were working alternately among the metal skeletons, and the scheduling algorithm had self-iterated to the seventh version in actual practice.

Su Che placed the thermos back on the table.

Second phase, joint simulation of the four core technologies in the Mirror World virtual orbital environment.

It will take six days.

To twist the four lines into a single rope.