Every year, 80 percent of the mined diamonds are utilized by different industries. Multiply that by 4 and you have an estimate as to how many of them are synthetically produced. Overall, there’s a total of more than 500 million carats (100 metric tons).

Uses of Diamonds
Diamonds are very essential components when you speak of industries. They play an important role in everyone’s lives. It is common knowledge that they are the hardest minerals available. Thus, they are particularly useful for polishing, grinding, and cutting other hard materials. They are important tools in designing concrete, eyeglasses, computer chips, ceramics, stones, and even other gems. They are also used in blades, in critical surgery, heat spreaders, specialty windows, and for other special purposes. Phonograph needles also make use of diamonds that help reproduce music for about 50 years now.

Primary Roles of Diamonds in the Industry
There are three common roles a diamond plays in any industry. It can serve as cutting tool; an abrasive when it’s attached to another type of material; and a grinder or polisher, when it’s transformed into paste or powder. There are a variety of reasons why a diamond is chosen for such specific purposes. For one it is known to be really hard and resistant to abrasion. It can cut other substances easily and is not prone to wear and tear, allowing you to cut costs. In automated production, diamonds are used to cut materials repeatedly.

Machining tools with diamonds are also used for boring, milling, and turning, when highly precise finishes are extremely required.

Diamonds are utilized when it comes to machining the following materials: glasses, plastics, and metals. They are also used to shape products like polygon mirrors found in laser printers, pistons made of aluminum alloys in vehicles, and drums used by photocopiers.

If there’s one limit for diamond, it’s the fact that it cannot be utilized in machining iron alloys. Sometimes there can be a very extreme temperature reaction between the minerals carbon and iron. When diamonds are exposed to very strenuous machining conditions, they can abrade very quickly.

Research Using Diamonds
Diamonds are known for their thermal conductivity, transparency, as well as surface properties. Thus, they make excellent materials for research instruments such as windows.

Another great example of the use of diamonds is with diamond anvil cell. It is a very small device that is capable of generating extreme pressure in any space created by two diamonds. They are commonly utilized in studies on the nature of a planet’s interior as well as its density. They can also help mimic Earth’s core and produce solid hydrogen.

How to Create High Pressure
The logic behind the creation of extreme pressure is simple. It only includes applying a force in the small area. But if you’re trying to produce very high pressure, you need the hardest material—one that is strong and incompressible. Thus, you need a diamond. Steels are no good as they can break or deform even before they are exposed to pressures comparable to those present in the core of Earth. Aside from diamond, you may settle for tungsten carbide. But for excellent results, you stick to the latter.

What you can do is to polish the ends of two clean brilliant round diamonds to about a millimeter wide. You then properly and correctly squeeze them together until you can come up with a pressure almost the same of the Earth’s, which is actually 4,500,000 atmospheres. Hydrogen may turn into metal when you reach such pressure. Nevertheless, you have mimicked a state that’s may existing in Jupiter.

You can pair diamond anvil cells with x-rays, optics, and lasers. They can be used to further investigate even the littlest samples. Hopefully, one can uncover more answers to the mystery of the universe.

CVD Diamonds
Aside from being hard, diamonds are known for their exceptional thermal conductivity, optical transparency, as well as a surface that’s weak with friction. These make them excellent materials when you talk about cutting-edge applications. Diamonds are commonly utilized in compact electronic equipment, in space shuttle, and other wear-resistant bearings. For these uses, however, you need to produce synthetic diamonds. This growth process is called chemical vapor deposition or CVD.

Today CVD diamonds are applied commercially, such as in thermal management. Diamond heat spreaders can refract byproduct heat from a particular device. You can grow the material by recreating the thermal conductivity used by both high-pressure but synthetic and natural diamonds that are still utilized as heat spreaders by other industries. You can also minimize cost and increase efficiency of its use by using even a wafer a CVD diamond to produce a lot of heat spreaders.

How Diamonds Are Grown
It was in 1796 when people knew that carbon is the main composition of diamonds. However, it took a total of 150 years to create synthetic diamonds.

A lot of scientists attempted but failed In the 1950s, however, everything took a complete turn when both American and Swedish researchers learned to “grow” diamonds. A similar element called graphite was exposed to 1400C or 55 atmospheres to produce a diamond. Molten iron was used to encourage faster transformation. Today, companies such as De Beers and GE produce almost 80 tons’ worth of synthetic diamonds each year.

Moving On to the Coming Years
There are many reasons why one should believe that it’s going to be a diamond world someday. One, the applications of diamond in various industries keep on increasing. Second the strategies of growing diamonds by either CVD or by high pressure are showing more of their potential. Expect to see diamonds in different highly advanced electronic equipment, optical windows and even surfaces that are scratch resistant.

Heat management in electronics with the use of huge CVD diamond layers is common nowadays. Take the 3D multichip module, which can actually be a very strong supercomputer later on. To increase its speed, wasted heat should be concentrated and electronics should remain compact. If you stack CVD diamonds and electronics, you can make a supercomputer sufficiently cool to work and small.