WI: Basic Oxygen Steelmaking introduced 10 years earlier

kernals12

Banned
The benefits of using basic oxygen in steel production had been known as far back as the 1850s but there simply wasn't a supply of purified oxygen available. Basic oxygen steelmaking began in Austria in 1948 and resulted in spectacular increases in labor productivity in the steel industry. So what if we had started using this in 1938 instead of 1948? This would presumably eliminate the wartime steel shortages, what would the battlefield impact be?
 
The benefits of using basic oxygen in steel production had been known as far back as the 1850s but there simply wasn't a supply of purified oxygen available. Basic oxygen steelmaking began in Austria in 1948 and resulted in spectacular increases in labor productivity in the steel industry. So what if we had started using this in 1938 instead of 1948? This would presumably eliminate the wartime steel shortages, what would the battlefield impact be?
A nice Anschluss present for Germany but too late to quickly adapt it in the other steel making plants before the war takes over all priority developments.
 

kernals12

Banned
A nice Anschluss present for Germany but too late to quickly adapt it in the other steel making plants before the war takes over all priority developments.
The Nazis would have to be pretty stupid to not make adapting this a priority. A basically unlimited supply of steel during the war would be a big advantage.
 
The Nazis would have to be pretty stupid to not make adapting this a priority. A basically unlimited supply of steel during the war would be a big advantage.
Steel plants are some of the biggest industrial facilities in existence, refitting those to something new takes a lot of planning and a lot of time where the plant isnt running or only with reduced capacity.
 

Deleted member 1487

The Nazis would have to be pretty stupid to not make adapting this a priority. A basically unlimited supply of steel during the war would be a big advantage.
You also need sufficient iron and pure oxygen inputs to make it work, that could easily turn into a bottleneck.
 

Deleted member 1487

Australia, Canada, the Soviet Union, the US, and South America all have plenty of iron ore.
Ok? I was talking about Nazi Germany during the war, who had only limited resources at it's disposal.

The benefits of using basic oxygen in steel production had been known as far back as the 1850s but there simply wasn't a supply of purified oxygen available. Basic oxygen steelmaking began in Austria in 1948 and resulted in spectacular increases in labor productivity in the steel industry. So what if we had started using this in 1938 instead of 1948? This would presumably eliminate the wartime steel shortages, what would the battlefield impact be?
Also you have to consider that the experiments to develop it started during WW2 and weren't able to be implemented until 1948.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Durrer
From 1933 to 1939, during his time in Nazi Germany, Durrer supervised experiments on the new steel making technique.[2] In 1943 Durrer returned from Nazi Germany to Switzerland and was appointed to the board of von Roll AG, the country's largest steelmaker.[1] Durrer teamed up with Heinrich Heilbrugge and ran a series of experiments that established commercial viability of basic oxygen metallurgy.[1] In 1947 Durrer ordered a small experimental converter from the United States, and on 1 April 1948 Durrer and Heilbrugge produced their first oxygen-blown steel.[1]

In the summer of 1948 von Roll AG and two Austrian state-owned companies, VÖEST and ÖAMG, agreed to commercialize the Durrer process.[3] Their commercial converter furnaces were put into operation in November 1952 (VÖEST in Linz) and May 1953 (ÖAMG, Donawitz)[4] and temporarily became the leading edge of the world's steelmaking, causing a surge in steel-related research.[5] Unlike Europe, whose industrial capacity had been decimated by World War II, America had a large base of steelmaking capacity, and it was economic to retain, rather than replace, its capital stock.

Also the US took until the 1960s to adopt it to avoid disrupting existing industry.
 

Deleted member 1487

I think motives during wartime would change that.
You would think so, but I suggest you consider the US response to the German stamped steel small arms innovations that made their weapons far cheaper than the US milled ones: they found any excuse to say the German guns were crappy desperation weapons and American guns were quality stuff that outlasted theirs. So the US went into Korea with WW2 weapons (some from WW1 like the BAR and Browning .30 and .50 cal) until finally borrowing German ideas to make things like the M60. Even the AR-15, which became the M16, and the AR-10 used similar concepts to improve on manufacturing and final product weapons and the military wanted nothing to do with them.

Like the military, US industry was also often quite stubborn in adapting to new technologies from the 1940s on, especially the steel industry, as evidenced by their refusal to invest in new production methods until the 1960s and they had to or go bankrupt.
 

kernals12

Banned
You would think so, but I suggest you consider the US response to the German stamped steel small arms innovations that made their weapons far cheaper than the US milled ones: they found any excuse to say the German guns were crappy desperation weapons and American guns were quality stuff that outlasted theirs. So the US went into Korea with WW2 weapons (some from WW1 like the BAR and Browning .30 and .50 cal) until finally borrowing German ideas to make things like the M60. Even the AR-15, which became the M16, and the AR-10 used similar concepts to improve on manufacturing and final product weapons and the military wanted nothing to do with them.

Like the military, US industry was also often quite stubborn in adapting to new technologies from the 1940s on, especially the steel industry, as evidenced by their refusal to invest in new production methods until the 1960s and they had to or go bankrupt.
Was that because they were stubborn, or was it because of union opposition to a technique that vastly reduced labor needs?
 

kernals12

Banned
Despite the title of that article, it says that strikes were very rare during the war and didn't last more than a day. Union leaders accepted labor peace for the most part and plenty of other innovative production methods were introduced during the war.
 

Deleted member 1487

Despite the title of that article, it says that strikes were very rare during the war and didn't last more than a day. Union leaders accepted labor peace for the most part and plenty of other innovative production methods were introduced during the war.
Despite the fact that they were legally prohibited from striking at all and were slandered for their lack of patriotism. You think if they were going to lose employment during the war due to improved automation/efficiency they wouldn't freak out and go harder than anything seen during WW2 IOTL?
 

kernals12

Banned
Despite the fact that they were legally prohibited from striking at all and were slandered for their lack of patriotism. You think if they were going to lose employment during the war due to improved automation/efficiency they wouldn't freak out and go harder than anything seen during WW2 IOTL?
There wasn't a problem with unemployment during the war.
 

Deleted member 1487

There wasn't a problem with unemployment during the war.
Right, which kept labor problems limited. Eliminate workers during the war when the rest of industry is expanding their labor force is going to create problems as the Steel Workers Unions are going to cause serious problems; they understood the war boom was temporary and were concerned about post-war employment too.
As it was it seems the steel industry's labor was rather restive and used WW2 to push their case thanks to the strategic need for labor passivity during the war:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Steel_strike#World_War_II
 

longsword14

Banned
Large industries have to be shown that their goods are inferior compared to others on the market. The problem is that unless industrial liquefaction becomes cheap enough the advantages might not look so obvious.
Get turboexpanders, develop them and use them. perhaps someone in the west does something similar to this guy. One way of getting oxygen in massive quantities would be for cryogenics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyotr_Kapitsa
 

kernals12

Banned
Large industries have to be shown that their goods are inferior compared to others on the market. The problem is that unless industrial liquefaction becomes cheap enough the advantages might not look so obvious.
Get turboexpanders, develop them and use them. perhaps someone in the west does something similar to this guy. One way of getting oxygen in massive quantities would be for cryogenics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyotr_Kapitsa
The thing is though is that the benefits of basic oxygen had been known for almost a century. I still can't find a satisfactory answer for why we didn't get mass production of purified oxygen sooner especially with all the advances in chemistry in the interwar era.
 
The thing is though is that the benefits of basic oxygen had been known for almost a century. I still can't find a satisfactory answer for why we didn't get mass production of purified oxygen sooner especially with all the advances in chemistry in the interwar era.
You just did:
Large industries have to be shown that their goods are inferior compared to others on the market. The problem is that unless industrial liquefaction becomes cheap enough the advantages might not look so obvious.
Get turboexpanders, develop them and use them. perhaps someone in the west does something similar to this guy. One way of getting oxygen in massive quantities would be for cryogenics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyotr_Kapitsa
The problem is that to get oxygen in industrial quantities cheaply you need to cool it down to cryogenic temperatures. To do that you need to expand it - easy through a throttle valve, but if you do so there is a bit more entropy and you lose all of the energy you put into compressing it in the first place, which pushes the cost up radically. A turboexpander is the first cousin of a jet engine (which wasn't available until... ummm... the 1940s) and both allows for closer to isentropic expansion and allows you to recover quite a lot of the energy at the same time, being used to compress the incoming gas. The Kapitsa design reduced the energy needed to create liquid oxygen by about 80% - without it the basic oxygen process just isn't economically viable.
 
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