Why can't we manufacture 'diamond'?

[Lifegazer]

Why can't we manufacture 'diamond'?

 

[(Q)]

Diamonds are only a reality conjured up by the Mind.

 

[Njorl]

We can and do. They are not generally as nice as jewelry quality natural diamonds.

You can even have your loved ones ashes from cremation used as the carbon source for the manufactured diamonds.

Njorl

 

[Lifegazer]

Originally posted by Njorl
We can and do.

How? Is it easy to do?

They are not generally as nice as jewelry quality natural diamonds.

Why? And does it have the same properties/attributes as 'natural diamond'?

You can even have your loved ones ashes from cremation used as the carbon source for the manufactured diamonds.

If we can manufacture diamond, why's it still so expensive?

I know this is going-off at a tangent, but why don't we coat our military vehicles with diamond, to give them more protection? Dollars I presume. But in theory, is a diamond tank indestructable? How strong/hard is diamond?

 

[Raavin]

I'm pretty sure that industrial diamonds are deposited on a surface using some sort of condensation method so they are tiny. I imagine that it would be ok for abrasion resistance but as far as structural strength I think diamond is fairly brittle. You can still smash a diamond with a hammer, you're just not likely to scratch it with another material.

Raavin

 

[Monique]

True, Njorl, diamonds are grown in factories and dead people are made into jewelry, all you need is some carbon and just apply a LOT of pressure to that, over weeks (or months) this diamond will grow.

The major problems with these diamonds were that they had impurities, like oxygen and nitrogen, changing the color of the stone. I think they have mainly overcome this problem now and they are coming to the point that these synthetic diamonds are almost indistinguishable from natural diamonds. The only way to tell at this point is to irradiate the stone, synthetic and natural diamonds react differently to this.

To reply about your question about industrial use: synthetic diamond is not the ideal all-purpose hard material. When heated up by friction in the presence of air, the diamond tends to decompose into carbon dioxide. And hot diamond dissolves in iron, so it can't be used to cut steel. There is actually a material better fit for this purpose Cubic boron nitride (cBN), first made in 1956, half as hard as diamond but more stable under those extreme circomstances.

Here an article about the dead-person-made-into-a-diamond:
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/us/WolfFiles/wolffiles253.html

 

[enigma]

That sounds absolutely morbid...

Would you really want to wear your relatives and loved ones?

Can you imagine how you would feel if you lost the gem, or if it was stolen?

Gives me the heebeegeebees, I say!

 

[climbhi]

Originally posted by enigma
That sounds absolutely morbid...

Would you really want to wear your relatives and loved ones?

Can you imagine how you would feel if you lost the gem, or if it was stolen?

Gives me the heebeegeebees, I say!

Even worse yet, what if you found out that the diamond you stole, or even worse: bought, was somones dead grandpa! Oh boy, that's a freaky thought.

 

[LURCH]

Originally posted by enigma


Would you really want to wear your relatives and loved ones?

Of course not; I'd want to SELL them!

 

[Lifegazer]

Originally posted by Monique
True, Njorl, diamonds are grown in factories and dead people are made into jewelry, all you need is some carbon and just apply a LOT of pressure to that, over weeks (or months) this diamond will grow.

What sort of value-diamond are we talking about?

 

[russ_watters]

What sort of value-diamond are we talking about?

As in can you pass it off as a gem quality natural diamond? You can't. The quality is pretty low.

 

[Monique]

Well, what I heard last year is that they were able to make perfect con-diamonds where the only characteristic distinguising them from the real ones was the reaction to radiation (the fake one glows or something).

But this might have been at a top-notch experimental factory.