The emergence of diamond cultivation

In 1796, the British chemist Smithson Tennant already proved that “diamond is nothing but plain carbon“. That’s right, diamond, like graphite, is an isomer of pure carbon. Therefore, mankind has never given up the search for a way to create synthetic diamonds.After 157 years, it was discovered that the most important factor in the successful transformation of carbon into diamond was the use of catalysts. In 1954, the U.S. based company GE successfully discovered that iron, cobalt, and nickel of the Fe group of metals were catalysts for the synthesis of diamonds; and after confirming the reproducibility, it was first announced that diamonds were successfully synthesized using the hydrostatic fusion method (GE method for short). In fact, as early as 1953, a group of scientists from ASEA in Sweden had already synthesized synthetic diamonds. One theory is that the practicality of synthesizing diamonds was not discovered at that time, while another theory is that the experiments at that time lacked complete data.Published.

Diamond Synthesis

Density and Pressure

Diamond has a density of 3.52 g/cm3, which is very stable due to its single component (pure carbon). The density of diamond is nearly twice as high as all other carbon compositions. Pure graphite has a density of 2.25 g/cm3, but the density of typical graphite materials is less than 1.8 g/cm3, thus confirming that the synthesis of diamonds requires extremely high pressure.

Thermal Conversion

In 1872, Austrian physicists discovered that the entropy of the macroscopic nature of matter, entropy, refers to the disorder of the arrangement of atoms (the degree of irregularity), the ultimate effect of heating is to promote the arrangement of atoms to become chaotic to increase the entropy value, while the pressurization will make the arrangement of atoms regularized to reduce the entropy value.

The effect of pressure is usually the opposite of temperature, e.g. carbon: graphite under pressure turns into diamond, while diamond under heat returns to graphite (pressure reduces volume, heat increases volume).

Ways to Generate Stress

  1. High temperature pressurization of machinery
  2. PVD Physical Vapor Deposition
  3. CVD Chemical Vapor Deposition
  4. Catalyst method
  5. Laser method (using CO₂ as carbon source)
  6. Explosion method

Cultivating Diamond Development

Cultivated diamonds have a wide range of uses. They are extremely hard and five times more thermally conductive than copper, making them highly valuable for industrial applications. More and more countries are investing in the cultivated diamond industry, and the size and quality of diamonds produced range from micronized and fine grained to 34-carat gem-quality cultivated diamonds, setting new records.

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