Can You Make Diamonds With a Hydraulic Press?

Diamonds are among the hardest natural materials, yet brittle enough to be crushed under pressures that would shatter other materials.

YouTube hydraulic press channel got their hands on an eye-opening 1.2 carat lab-created diamond and put it through rigorous tests. The results were truly astonishing.

The Hydraulic Press

Hydraulic Presses are machines that utilize hydraulics to generate force between pistons. This pressure can then be used for metalworking applications like blanking, forming, punching, coining and drawing.

Hydraulic presses are indispensable tools in many manufacturing settings, due to their ease of use and powerful capabilities. You'll find both manual and powered models available. When selecting one for your shop, be sure to consider its size and horsepower requirements; these will determine its level of power and what kinds of projects it can handle.

People are often curious to know whether diamonds can be crushed with a hydraulic press. Although diamonds are the hardest natural material on Earth, this does not render them indestructible; in fact, they can be quite fragile and broken if hit hard enough.

If you have ever seen a diamond being crushed in real life, chances are it was lab-grown diamond instead of its natural equivalent. Diamond production differs significantly from natural ones; synthetic diamonds are created through high pressure high temperature (HPHT) methods that mimic conditions deep underground where natural ones form.

Although the HPHT method creates diamonds with chemical composition similar to natural ones, they must still be protected from other materials which might break their atomic bonds and damage its value in order to retain its worth.

A video created by The Hydraulic Press Channel features a 1.2-carat lab-created diamond placed into a hydraulic press. As anticipated, its fate was to shatter into tiny fragments and scratch any surface it touched, captivating viewers' interest but emphasizing that diamond is not indestructible; rather it's fragile. While not being the strongest stone, diamond is definitely the hardest and this distinction often gets confused with toughness (the maximum compressive or tensile stress a material can withstand before breaking).

The Cubic Press

The cubic press is an integral component in the production of laboratory-grown diamonds. Used to apply immense pressure to carbon at temperatures up to 2,700 degrees Fahrenheit, its heat and pressure cause carbon crystals to fuse together to form diamonds - these gems are then carefully cooled down until ready for cutting and polishing into final products.

There are currently two methods by which labs produce diamonds: High Pressure-High Temperature (HPHT) and Chemical Vapor Deposition (CVD). With HPHT, small diamond seeds are placed into pieces of carbon in either a belt press, cubic press, or split-sphere (BARS) press before being exposed to immense pressure (up to 730,000 psi) and temperature (over 2,700 F), melting off carbon compounds which feed back onto the diamond seed where they begin growing into either an octahedron or hexa-cubic shape depending on machine parameters set by machine parameters set by machine parameters set by parameters set by machine parameters set by parameters set by machine parameters.

Detonation synthesis, which attempts to emulate observations made at meteorite crash sites that show nano-sized diamonds can form spontaneously through powerful explosions, employs carbon explosives to produce the required pressure and temperature for diamond formation. Unfortunately, detonation synthesis has yet to scale up production levels beyond small batches of creation.

Caratek rod-connected cubic presses offer an alternative method of production without the same drawbacks as traditional presses; they're capable of applying greater pressure without fear of explosion, as well as operating at very fast speeds without fear of explosion - though still unreliable production methods.

The Split-Sphere Press

Diamonds form under intense pressure and temperature conditions found deep within Earth's crust. To recreate these conditions, scientists use the HPHT process by pressurizing carbon-based starting materials with metal catalysts; this allows carbon atoms from graphite to break apart and join with diamond atoms, creating larger gem-quality diamonds. While perfecting this technique took decades of effort and testing, today it remains one of the most popular ways of creating synthetic diamonds.

General Electric's belt press utilizes an upper and lower anvil to generate over 1.5 million pounds per square inch of pressure, reaching temperatures exceeding 2,000 degrees Celsius. The combination of pressure and temperature causes raw carbon to melt around a small diamond seed, creating natural diamonds - known as polycrystalline diamonds which may not be suitable for jewelry but may prove invaluable industrially.

Cubic presses represent the next level in HPHT diamond production. Instead of two anvils, these sophisticated presses use six pistons that simultaneously apply pressure across all faces of a cube-shaped volume containing diamond seed and carbon medium. They're more efficient at producing larger diamonds and faster than belt presses - both qualities make this kind of press highly sought-after in HPHT manufacturing facilities.

Chemical Vapor Deposition (CVD), the newest advancement in lab-grown diamond production, is quickly replacing HPHT as the method of choice for creating diamond crystals. CVD uses a chamber filled with carbon rich gases such as methane and hydrogen; lasers or microwave technologies then use laser ionization to break down molecular bonds of these gases to generate pure carbon ions that deposit themselves on an initial diamond seed and form your crystal.

This process may be more expensive than the belt and cubic press, but it produces large diamonds quickly. Once produced, many are then treated with heat treatments that alter both their color and clarity - for instance adding boron can make your diamond blue while radiation can create pink and red hues in it.

The Belt Press

Diamonds form naturally over billions of years due to naturally occurring high temperatures and pressure deep within the earth's core, while lab grown diamonds replicate this process through HPHT and Chemical Vapor Deposition (CVD). There are three separate press designs which create high temperatures and pressure required for creating diamonds: belt press, cubic press and the split-sphere (BARS) press.

The belt press is a large machine with upper and lower anvils to generate over 1.5 million PSI of pressure, creating temperatures high enough for raw carbon to melt around a small diamond seed, producing diamond crystals of various sizes from just a few carats up to 10 carats and beyond. This method has become the go-to method for laboratory diamond production and allows us to produce thousands of them each month!

Once a gem-grade diamond has been produced, it is removed from the belt press and allowed to cool for several days, during which carbon atoms build up on its seed to form its final form: either an octahedron or hexagon. After which, it is taken out, cleaned up and ready for final cutting and polishing.

In 1954, General Electric (GE) used their first belt press to produce the world's very first lab grown diamonds. Since then, technology has been refined and enhanced to become more efficient and cost effective; one major change being graphite; a non-crystalline form of carbon that stores heat more effectively than natural diamonds thus speeding up and streamlining growth processes more efficiently.

Another significant advancement was the creation of an HPHT/CVD hybrid process known as LD, which combined these processes for increased efficiency. LD was inspired by meteorite crashes around the world where diamonds are formed when meteorites crash into each other; basically it involves placing a capsule with diamond seed into an underground chamber filled with carbon and metals and detonating an explosive to release intense amounts of heat that transforms carbon into crystallized diamond crystals very rapidly.