Artificial diamonds

The artificial diamond industry is a raging business today. Artificial diamonds are made in much the same way that they are made in nature.

Since the 1950s, engineers have tried to replicate nature’s process in a laboratory by incorporating tremendous pressure and heat on coal or graphite. In nature, 30 million years ago, the underground hot lava called magma was squeezed enough to make carbon atoms that were bonded to form diamonds.

In a similar process in laboratories, people have been able to build machines that can crush and cook carbon into diamonds. It takes about 50,000 atmospheres of pressure, that’s about thousand times the pressure in a car tire applied for a few days on the process. Of course, the diamonds made this way are small, and the challenge is to make a machine that can withstand all this crushing and pressure.

One method used to make artificial diamonds is to use a seed of a diamond, add to it molten coal or graphite, tremendous pressure and temperature, until the seed becomes larger through an addition to its crystalline structure. Another method is called the chemical vapor disposition, which tiny pieces of diamond precipitate and condense together in a chamber, in layers to form a deposit. These are usually free of imperfections.

Engineers have long been able to create tiny shards if diamonds for industrial use. Diamonds are the hardest substance known and are used to cut through metals easily. Although experiments have been carried out for the last fifty years, it was only in 2004 that companies started developing methods successfully for producing cultivated diamonds large enough to be used for jewelry. Diamond certification too will be given for these artificial diamonds.