• @[email protected]
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        4224 days ago

        While not enough for jewelry, this is great for industrial applications, like abrasive grinding wheels or diamond tipped saw blades

      • BarqsHasBite
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        24 days ago

        Trying to size that: That’s 0.2 micrometers. Fine sand is 75 micrometers to 425 micrometers.

        (1000 micrometers = 1 millimeter)

  • @[email protected]
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    7524 days ago

    These diamonds are too tiny for jewelry but I don’t care.

    I want a diamond heat spreader for my CPU!

  • @[email protected]
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    5824 days ago

    One problem is that the diamonds grown with this technique are tiny

    So the next we need is a way to shrink the women so that they fit.

  • @[email protected]
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    5223 days ago

    Everyone always thinks the jewelry when they think of diamonds but I am excited for the prospects of what cheap lab-grown diamonds can do for manufacturing. Diamonds are electrically insulative and yet 10 times more thermally conductive than copper. There are a LOT of industries that would be VERY interested in that.

    Hell, it would probably be useful in CPU substrate as well. Instead of silicon semi conductor doping if these could be made precisely enough you could use diamond for the insulation layers and gain that insane heat transfer efficiency to help with avoiding Hotspots. Maybe that’s too thin to matter that much not sure

    • @[email protected]
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      1024 days ago

      Looking forward to a future when fake rhinestones are just kinda shit manufactured diamonds.

      • @[email protected]
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        324 days ago

        I have a tungsten steel nozzle on mine and it’s been good for a long time, I imagine it’ll run forever. Does anybody have experience with the diamond ones? Are they worth the extra expense?

        • @[email protected]
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          424 days ago

          I haven’t tried them myself but they have (at least in theory) a lot of benefits speaking for them.

          You won’t wear them out, no matter how abrasive your filament is. At least until you print diamonds I guess.

          Diamond conducts heat so much better than any other material you might make nozzles from it’s hard to believe. You might (or will) run your prints way cooler, or faster.

          Several other things I won’t explain here because I have no idea and would have to make them up on the spot. But how cool would it be to print with a poly crystalline diamond nozzle? I bet you’d drown in panties.

          Which could be a drawback.

          • @[email protected]
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            324 days ago

            Looking into it, these are very fragile nozzles. Even more so than the ruby ones. The Tungsten nozzles are the true robust nozzle. It will wear out if you’re using filament with abrasive materials but it takes a lot to do it. I’m going to keep it in mind but probably won’t consider it

  • @[email protected]
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    24 days ago

    Similar conditions are employed in the method currently used to synthesize 99% of all artificially created diamonds. Called high-pressure and high-temperature (HPHT) growth, this method uses these extreme settings to coax carbon dissolved in liquid metals, like iron, to convert it to diamond around a small seed, or starter diamond.

    Cool. I don’t know how expensive this process is right now, but it seems cheaper to do, at least on mass production.

    Edit: I wonder if they could make a tether out of this thing.

    • @[email protected]
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      1424 days ago

      “Bender, be careful! Thats the ship’s diamond filament tether. It’s unbreakable!”

      “Then why do I have to be careful?”

      “It belonged to my grandmother.”

        • @threelonmusketeers
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          223 days ago

          For a tether, I feel like you’d want something with a high tensile strength, like Kevlar or Zylon. Diamonds are very hard, but also brittle.

  • @[email protected]
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    1624 days ago

    However, the new method has its own challenges. One problem is that the diamonds grown with this technique are tiny; the largest ones are hundreds of thousands of times smaller than the ones grown with HPHT. That makes them too small to be used as jewels.

    Not going to be wearing these any time soon

    • @[email protected]
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      2424 days ago

      Just wear hundreds of thousands of them glued together, problem solved.

      On a more realistic note though, the applications of this will probably be industrial for a good while. I found it interesting how the article mentions that they were able to develop a diamond coating over their growth substrate. That probably has some cool applications in industrial settings where diamond-plated materials are used.

          • @[email protected]
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            1024 days ago

            It depends; if a company can use this to make them stupid cheap, then selling them stupid cheap to undercut all their competitors could still make them more money than keeping the price the same and pocketing the saved production costs.

            • @[email protected]
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              824 days ago

              I was making a jab. I’m aware of market forces, but price memory is a thing and often the true cost of production isn’t reflected in consumer pricing. Especially when an industry just decides they can keep prices where they are if not raise them, looking at you egg producers.

    • @[email protected]
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      724 days ago

      Not useful for jewelry, but possibly quite useful for many manufacturing or industrial purposes?

    • @[email protected]
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      223 days ago

      We have a while to wait before everyone has microdiamonds in their testicles, but one day we’ll get there!

  • @[email protected]
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    1323 days ago

    Do we really want to use the word “groundbreaking” to describe advances in synthetic minerals?

  • @[email protected]
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    24 days ago

    they are small, but the large diamonds are made from seeds, so still can be used for that, or techniques can improve for larger size production in the future, also, small diamonds are useful for cutting machines

  • 👍Maximum Derek👍
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    324 days ago

    Either JPL or LM (I can’t remember which) was working on a HTHP system with the goal of being able to grow diamonds with ICs built in. I wonder if this has that potential.

      • 👍Maximum Derek👍
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        924 days ago

        Defense contractors want to grow diamond computer processors. Because silicon breaks down at high temperatures.

              • 👍Maximum Derek👍
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                224 days ago

                Carbon, compressed hard enough it becomes diamond, forms a square crystal lattice that is so crazy stable that it’s very resistant to change (including from burning).

                • @threelonmusketeers
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                  223 days ago

                  Is diamond more resistant to burning than other forms of carbon? I thought even lowly graphite is pretty stable at high temperatures…

              • Zorque
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                224 days ago

                Just like humans are basically just trees, because they’re both carbon based lifeforms, right?

          • Zorque
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            424 days ago

            Yeah, but at about 400 degrees higher than silicon.