HYDRAULIC PRESS TURNS GRAPHITE INTO DIAMOND
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 17 เม.ย. 2024
- The process of creating an artificial diamond from graphite using a 500 ton hydraulic press. Challenge
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Graphite in pencils is mixed with clay. This makes it a poor choice for making diamonds out of. Pure carbon powder is cheap and will give a much better result.
Basically that's charcoal powder you can buy it as toothpaste these days at the dollar store extremely fine powder that is on the micron scale ⚖️
Indeed, with the silicon and aluminum compounds in clay I'd say he made a dirty amethyst-sapphire hybrid thing or similar at best
You need pressure and heat on the same time.
Well, congratulations would seem to be in order. Those are very definitely the yellow crystals of industrial diamonds.
Used to sell for less than $1 per carat (very roughly about 1/4 inch cubed, or 6mm cubed), 30 years ago. So no, this is not an economical production system.
The yellow colour is due to nitrogen atoms getting trapped in the diamond crystal as it forms. That can be scavenged out by chemical additives to the reaction chamber, but it just adds cost and complexity. For use as grinding pastes and powders, or sintered into "tip tools" for use on lathes, or drill bits that core into hard rock, the colour is irrelevant.
De Beers used to be one of the "big three" manufacturers of industrial diamond last century. They started out using 500 ton presses back in the 1950's. By 1990, they were using presses capable of 22,000 tons, and a piston size of 6 inches. They could make 3,000 carats of industrial diamond crystals in about 45 minutes, per press. The tungsten carbide piston and die used multiple steel bands as support rings (aka compound cylinder, using Lame equations), to avoid the piston collapse you experienced.
The engineering needed was at the very limits of material science and industrial capability. And it still is. Tungsten carbide can withstand about 45k atmospheres, but only in compression. It is no better than a good steel in tension, surviving maybe only 10k atmospheres. And what you have not mentioned at all, is that when the piston presses on the graphite to build up the compressive pressure in the press axis direction, tensile stresses are created in the other two dimensions. The piston expands radially, relying on the cylinder for radial support (lubricated by extruding graphite in the 3rd experiment) but ultimately that cylinder will also split due to tensile hoop stresses from the graphite (and cylinder) pressing outwards on the inner bore.
Another fun fact: graphite is nature's best spring. A solid lump of it can be compressed to half of it's original height, and will then bounce back all the way to it's original height with no permanent deformation. Try doing that with any metal - you'd be lucky to get beyond 1% compression. Bear in mind I am NOT talking about a geometric device like an automobile suspension spring - I'm talking about a SOLID BLOCK of the material.
In fact, given the cylinder dimensions, I am completely surprised it did not split if the pressure was indeed high enough to make diamond. I mean, even the piston in the second experiment mushroomed completely before it reached the appropriate load. In fact, experiment 2 was a complete misdirection, since once that piston mushroomed and transferred the axial load onto the end of the cylinder (which also became expanded) the press load was NOT compressing the graphite any more, and ALL of the load increase went axially through the cylinder instead.
The indentation into the press platten of the third experiment proves the press load was transmitted though the piston and graphite. You should have seen an identical indent in the upper platten, buried beneath the shards from the WC (that's chemical annotation for Tungsten Carbide, btw, and not Water Closet). If you had used pads of WC top and bottom to diffuse the load, you might have saved your plattens. But it was also likely you would have sheared discs in those pads, and had the same end result damage. The pads would probably have had to be something like 50mm thick (as a raw guesstimate) to have avoided shear failure and protected the plattens.
Certain ceramic powders (soils, or crushed rocks) can indeed withstand the pressure gradient to seal in the graphite. De Beers had developed quite a few special concotions to achieve that "gasket". It was all highly secret, since nobody wanted to reveal to the competition just how their process worked.
Your temperature, however, would only have been high close to the copper. The piston and die (and possibly the press frame) all form conductive paths that would disperse and distribute the current from the welder. Resistance of the graphite is relatively high compared with those metals, so the current would have passed through the metal as a short circuit (you mentioned the breaker tripped) and avoided the graphite as much as possible. Temperature is a function of current density, meaning that while the copper wire was hot enough to melt and fuse, once that copper touched the piston and die and press it would have dispersed to a much lower density, and hence have heated the material far less.
It is possible to convert graphite to diamond without needing that high temperature - but the pressure has to be far higher. I think you managed that by accident - rather than 50k atmospheres and 1000C, you probably got something like 70k atmospheres and a few hundred C at best. Those pressures will destroy any containment vessel, so it can never be cost effective.
Also, you had no molten metal (iron and cobalt are typical solvents) that can dissolve the graphite and nucleate out the diamond crystals which then grow larger by diffusion of carbon through the molten metal. Crystal size thus depends on time, and even the small crystals you got here seem far too big for the time it was under pressure.
Which all means I am not entirely sure how you got relatively large diamond crystals that show no sign of inclusions of graphite in them (black streaks embedded in the crystal). That kind of "total matrix transformation" from the planar hexagons of graphite into the 3D tetrahedron of diamond is not something I have ever encountered. It feels more like the shock loading option, using ballistic projectiles splatting to a dead stop (like firing cast iron lumps with large graphite inclusions at high speed into a concrete wall) to generate a transient dynamic pressure that achieves the transformation. But this press process is not at all dynamic (fast) enough to do that.
One last semantic for general benefit: these are synthetic diamonds. Which does NOT meant they are "artificial" diamonds. No, these are very much real diamond, made of carbon.
The word "synthetic" means man-made, as opposed to naturally occuring. Hence, a synthetic fuel is a fuel we have created from coal, or plant oils, or suchlike. Synthetic diamond (whether the grotty yellow of industrial diamonds, or the pick-your-preferred color of some modern gemstone diamonds) were manufactured by us, not dug out the ground.
Artificial diamonds would be an alternative material like Cubic Zirconia - definitely NOT carbon, and hence not diamond, but a mineral crystal that has similar refractive properties to polished diamonds, hence they can LOOK like gemstone diamonds, sparkling with similar brilliance, at a fraction of the price.
The difference between artifical and synthetic is one of the most widely misunderstood uses of language...
Well done for reading this far. Sorry for the excess detail. I hope you found it interesting.
Damn, you should start a youtube channel lol
Thanks for the insights!
@ARealGopher someone who actually studies this basically. Not necessarily smarter just more committed to this knowledge than most
That was educational!
Holy shit dude, get investors and make some diamonds
I saw superman doit with heat vision and pressure in his hands
Oh wow like that dude trying to create diamonds is superman, sry dude but supermans not real
@@davethegirlboss 1 iq
@@davethegirlboss whole new levels of dumb is what you're reaching with comments like that
was looking for this exact comment - good job.
@davethegirlboss Jesus... SMH..... Actually the name sort of sums it up for me. Enough said
You’re missing 2 key components. Heat and time, as well as more pressure…
Math is hard
That's exactly what I was going to say
Did you even watch the video lmfaoooooo
You're missing 1 key component: a brain.
So you didn’t watch the video. You could have just said so 🤷♂️
Seems to me that you just short circuited your welding transformer by a big metal slab and it had miniscule effect on the temperature rise in the pressure chamber due to very low resistance of metals the chamber consisted of, big thermal mass of the slab and relatively high resistance of graphite. The current just won't go through graphite in such conditions. Not to mention ridiculous wire connections. A few minutes of heating up with a blow torch under pressure seem way more appropriate.
I agree
A candle across the room would add more heat than that ridiculous setup.
fist thought, he must have thought of this but went the show must go on.
We ridicule alchemists in the old world for trying to turn lead into gold yet it is possible to turn graphite into diamond. They were close
Bismuth into gold has been done, a group of physicists transmuted several thousand atoms of bismuth into gold at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory with its "Bevalac" particle accelerator. At the time the team said that would make gold cost about a quadrillion dollars an ounce for the electricity at the 6 cents per KWh in 1980, it's about 16 cents in Livermore now so 2.7 quadrillion dollars today! They said they could have also used lead or mercury as the starting point but bismuth made it easier to detect the gold at the end because bismuth has only one stable isotope while the other metals have more so they could detect the various radioactive isotopes of gold plus calculate the number of stable gold atoms from the known ratios of production.
And yeah, that means any big lump of gold you could hold in your hand that was produced that way would be lethally radioactive for quite some time with half lives up to half a year for the unstable isotopes!
So the goal of the alchemists wasn't impossible, just doing it with purely chemical means meant energies per atom involved off by a factor of a billion or so, (a few eV of atoms involved in chemical reactions versus the Bevalac's 1 -2 billion eV per atom). Hence big honking electric bill for running a machine eating $5,000 an hour in electricity for 24 hours to make their few thousand atoms of gold, when an ounce has about 3 with 21 zeroes after it number of atoms!
this is completely different, to turn lead to gold you need to add/ take protons from the atoms in this case graphite is pure carbon as well as diamonds.
this has been done many times in particle accelerators.
@@macheadg5er too expensive to commercially use for making gold
You basically immediately created short circuit with the uninsolated wire touching a cylinder of conductive metal from two sides. So the current was flowing by the path of least resistance, which would be most likely the surface of the cylinder.
-Mama i want those diamonds.
-Mama: we have diamonds at home
-diamonds we have at home:
I certainly hope you gave your kitty a treat, after all it was his help that allowed you to succeed.
At first thought i thought the cat had a better chance of pooping diamonds then you trying to press them but i guess it worked ! Pretty freaking neat !
I would recommend an inductive heater - pretty easy to make and works with steel - for the chamber heating.
FYI, there is no 3 times less or 2 times less, there is one third and one half. If you struggle with fractions, just use percentages.
Though that's technically correct.
It is acceptable to use the terms like he did. "THIS was three times less than what's required." we all know what he means
Along with the electric arc welder try heating up everything in an open crucible before adding the pressure.
Once glowing hit the pressure and leave it on for about 30 minutes, you should be able to get the atmospheric pressure and temps coupled with the time might get you to diamond.
The importance of this experience isn't the amount produced but just to show that it's theoretically possible and what conditions are required. Once you figure that out, it's possible to devise more efficient ways to achieve those results.
Like artificial Diamonds don't already exist
There are great dangers in using presses. Just because there is almost no motion it hides the terrible forces at work! The psi developed is far greater than in a firearm and parts can fly at lethal speeds if something breaks! Please watch videos of press danger and injury.!
It looks like the press makes a dead short for the electrical power and not across the graphite.
I think you should try During HPHT, pure carbon is pressed within a metal cube and exposed to immense heat and pressure through electric pulses. Eventually, the carbon breaks down and crystallises into a diamond. Any metal traces within a HPHT diamond will be minuscule and usually not visible to the naked eye
i'd say it is cheaper to hire superman to do it for you.. heat vision & superman's hand grip 😂🤣
Love your "observer"!
The stuff you do with this press is pretty dang cool. And the kitty helping out adds a great touch. you got my sub. sandpaper or an abrasive of some kind .
When they started making diamonds in the lab the diamond conglomerates started pushin the idea that if a diamond was "too perfect" then it wasn’t as valuable. Right after decades of selling "perfect' diamonds. What a huge racket.
Diamonds the size needed for Barbie's wedding ring when Ken proposes.
at LLNL on visitors day, they used the "Diamond Anvil" to turn peanut butter into tiny diamonds!!
Okay, this was utterly cool!
Indeed, the the heat part seems a bit rushed and use a better carbon source
Wow. Congratulations. I wouldn't think you'd get a decent engagement ring from this experiment, it's certainly interesting though!
Pete 🏴
We used diamond polishing compounds for injection molds. It came in a 1ml syringe and cost hundreds of dollars. A dab on a popsicle stick can make small scratches disappear.
This video would need to last a few million years for any success.
Not only do you need to exert a lot of pressure on the graphite, you also need to put a lot of heat into it as well.
So 2 heated plugs one from top one from bottom....then squish them together
Clue: No it doesn't.
This may come as a shocker, steel makes an extremely poor electrical insulator.
There was No arc whatsoever.
An insulated wire might have allowed some arcing.
he could also have filled up the volume between the tungstencarbide rod and the metal drillhole with some insulator, so there is only a contact going "trough" the carbon on the bottom and nowhere else
Steel isn't all that conductive. It's commonly used as a minor insulator any time steel is wanted for its other properties as well.
@@WilhelmEleywhat would you suggest to get the temperature going then ?
"as a shocker" -- nicely done
As neat as it is to see someone make a diamond with a hydraulic press... this is done every day. Manufacturing diamonds isn't as uncommon as people might think. Industrial diamonds are made and then put on tools like masonry drill bits or concrete saw blades. They're not pretty, but they are functional.
That's novelty diamonds for you to keep. Worth zero to me really, if was my experiment..priceless and I'd keep them for myself..
Gave the cat a like!!!
I guess you could use diamonds of that size as abrasive agents in a polishing paste or possibly make some kind of sandpaper out of them.
Always need to be mindful with carbide. It’s going to mess up anything you press it into until it explodes into micro shrapnel.
9:56 a cat... one like for the cat
Use a spring on bottom to lift the cylinder, but put a plug on bottom and top, then crush from both ends at same time....the spring will keep cylinder suspended until both plugs are crushed inside..hope it wont explode.
🎉ehhh might be a couple dollars worth
You could use the diamonds for clockmaking.
Superman can do it just by squeezing coal in his hands..🙌
As demonstrated by carbon vapor deposition CVD diamond formation, the temperature is more critical for the creation of a diamond molecular matrix than pressure.
There’s some pretty neat “do-it-at-home” sputtering devices from just jam jars on YT. Might be interesting to check those out
Great job! keep pushing.
Diamond sand is an abrasive, like sand paper. I think if you change your setup a bit you could get a much better and larger yeild. Very cool
It take time to grow crystals.
damn Very cool
Youd need pure graphite and a diamond seed to start the crystlization. Pencil lead contains some clay.
We use a pressure cooker and a bearing press to form 0.5 Carat diamonds, it takes a few tweaks to perfect the process but well worth it for the thousands they sell for. The yellowing is a simple fix as it's high-school chemistry.
I'm surprised more people aren't doing it. It's way safer than cooking meth and it's amazingly not illegal (yet).
The temperatures of the coper wires had to have gotten as hot as a minimum of 1,865° (1,864.62°) Celsius if they were melted in places because that temperature said is the melting point of copper. So that wire got up to about 2,000+° Celsius in some spots.
They'd be neat in a real wind up watch.
You could possibly make your own grinding type of tooling with them, which would make for an interesting video I’d certainly watch lol
You need a more round center cylinder, set the welder lower so that it doesn't short circuit and only turn it on when the pressure is built up.
finally someone did it.
Scientifically speaking, "who the hell knows!". :D
Use Carbon Black either mixed with or without Graphite.
Try forming the material into a large solid piece with the press gently, then heat that large piece to over 1200 degrees. Quickly put it into the steel hole attached to copper wires then press.
Just an idea but you might get larger diamonds or more of them.
Diamond is made at the right PRESSURE and TEMPERATURE
Many people forget the temperature part
Consider the fact that if all you had to do was put graphite in a press and crush it to make diamonds, diamonds would be worthless.
Diamonds are already low value. They're not easy or cheap to make, but they are very abundant in certain places. Jewelry companies are lying to you about their worth and artificially inflating their market price to perhaps hundreds of times their actual value.
@@TheReaverOfDarkness There is a major difference between a diamond that would be used in jewelry, which are quite rare, and industrial diamonds. Industrial diamonds are quite cheap because they are so common. Jewelry diamonds are not. Cheaper than one would think, but jewelry, especially high quality jewelry, is artisanal work and commands top price due to the skill needed not not only properly cut and polish them, but also the rest of the process in creating the jewelry.
@@jgkitarel No, that's not true. Most industrial diamonds are synthetic. The really big prize diamonds that make the news and wind up in some figure of royalty's palace are rare and hard to find. But basic jewelry-grade diamonds are so abundant we could literally fit every human on Earth with a diamond ring. The cost of having those 5 or so carat diamonds cut and polished to jewelry grade standards and then set within a 14 carat gold ring is less than the cost of the gold in the gold ring. (Though, gold price is also greatly over-inflated.) If you go into a tax-free zone, you can buy diamond rings for under $100 US. When they charge you $15,000+ for a diamond, that fee is almost entirely the cost of purchasing the stone itself, and it funds the diamond cartels' ability to enslave the diamond miners, control market share, and pretend they don't have billions of these things stocked away in private reserves.
"When i heard the cat mewing" - Sigma cat
As I don't possess a hydraulic press at home, these experiments are hardly likely to be repeated at my home anyway.
I gave my girlfriend a lump of coal for Christmas one year. Told her in a million years it might be a diamond so here’s your started kit. It didn’t go over well
Wouldn’t it be a lot more efficient to use all te surface of the hydraulic press and concentrate it into the surface of the tube using a conical connecting piece? The pressure on both sides will be equal, you won’t break your press, and you’ll need a lot less force.
I would like to see commercial industrial process in action.
You could use them in a diamond wheel - i.e. a grinding wheel, or plate.
Still got diamonds that's good enough.
I think it's fantastic rather than get my wife. A large diamond ring. I will get her a $20 coupon toward finding a 500 ton press. And somebody who would make her a diamond.
Add some thermite to the top of the pure carbon power. The pressure could set off the thermite that would give you your heat and greatly raise the pressure at the same time.
I am pretty sure you need a seed diamond to grow bigger crystal onto it.
And then you are not supposed to keep pressing harder and harder,
you are supposed to get it up to the correct pressure and heat and then let it stay there for a long time to grow them larger.
You would need water to make the carbon material moist to get it to make bond for perfect diamonds.
“Do not try this at home” well no shit i dont got diamonds
I dont remember were i saw it but there was a video that showed how they use explosives to create low grade diamonds for industrial use
Ramming speeed!!!!
Diamonds like that could be used in drill bits, maybe
Digging a 1000 m deep hole and put pure cabon at the base and then fill the hole with lead cylinders and melt the lead and seal the pit will make the finest pure diamonds
The professionals use a diamond for nucleation inside their machines. And they use more /t as they are using heat and pressure. You may also wish to insulate the conductors. Like washers...
I was thinking... induction for heat and perhaps fire a canon ball for the "pressure"?
Use aluminum in it to remove the yellow from the diamond.
Small diamonds make excellent abrasives.
Yeahp, cats are awesome...!!! Electric arc inside .... I doubt it, because that was a short circuit between the top and the bottom
of the cylinder, and that's why the circuit breaker went down....!!! Good video.
What would you suggest to get the heat up ?
alright that was awesome and unexpected, you definitely earned a sub for this
Those diamonds could be used for drills and bits!!
Umm, I don’t know for sure but my geologist father once told me that diamonds are created under extreme pressures, yes…but also extreme heat 🔥 🌋
😅
…so you should probably add a flamethrower in the mix!? 😂
You'd better put a paper towel under that or you're gonna have some scratches on the base. 😂 I'm dying to see if he welded the piston to the press. 😂😂😂
The forst 2 attempts the length of the center piece did not seem long enough because it seems like the press hit the sides which contains the graphite but does not put pressure on it. Only the carbide one seemed long enough.
Use a carbide drill blank.
Lab grown diamonds are a thing.
It's exactly like the natural ones
I find it funny that you have a very high-end press and a $10 pair of calipers.
pressurise metal have a higher fusion point then no pressure ^^
You bought a tungsten carbide tool blank, that’s why it has flats. Look for normal rod stock, but I don’t think tungsten is your best bet. It’s very strong but brittle. You may do better with a high nickel alloy such as Inconel or Haynes or a cobalt alloy like Stellite.
Bravo tungsteno perfect
It requires heat as one of the 3 components. A press won't do that.
That's what the electrical arc was for.
What would you suggest?
if you had performed the test in a sealed room free of nitrogen, you could have produced diamonds without yellow color.
I wonder if we can make nuclear diamonds like this
Para incrementar la temperatura, usa una de induccion rodeando el cilindro,
Did you send them to a lab to test them to be sure they were actual diamond, and not the result of other impurities? Pencil led has other stuff added to it and IDK what the temperatures and pressures in this experiment might do to those impurities. Its mostly clay, so it might produce some kind of glossy ceramic that looks like what you found. If they are real diamonds then that's awesome. Either way I would love to see more experiments. I would recommend using activated carbon. You can find it in most drug stores and it is very high purity. If you used an all tungsten setup of die and piston and didn't go too high on the pressure, it might last a lot longer and produce much bigger crystals. Turning the heat down a bit might also increase the life of the experiment and the crystal size.
Congratulations for the result.
Tumbler sand is what I think it would be good in.
should use the press to turn a screw into a point press could effectively redistribute the pressure more efficiently.....but what do i know :P
Very good work!!
Also carbon will convert on the edge of steel into Fe³C (surface layer).
Might depend on the coal you used too. Example thermal coal has different properties than PCI coal and they both have different properties than hard metallurgical steel making coal. If you have good hard met coal it’s carbon content is very high.
Such diamonds are used to coat diamond drillbits obviously. Actually industrial diamonds are more valuable than natural ones because they are flawless. It is the fashion industry that tries to convince people natural diamonds have value for obvious reasons but they are pretty useless because they have too many flaws causing structural weaknesses. Cracks, imperfections that kind of things. Diamonds have no value because they are so cheap to produce.