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Russia
By Svetlana Shelest
St. Petersburg’s New Diamond Technology LLC has announced a record-breaking achievement in growing laboratory-cultivated diamonds. In March 2015, a group of engineers under the supervision of Alexander Kolyadin, the company’s technical director, and Dr. Andrey Katrusha, the project’s research adviser, successfully completed growing one of the world’s largest laboratory-produced diamonds — weighing 32.26 carats — in a record-breaking time frame. The company said that technology will be the main application for its new synthetic diamonds, rather than polished diamonds for the jewelry industry. The record for the world’s largest laboratory-grown diamond is still held by the 34.80-carat type Ib yellow diamond created by De Beers Diamond Research Laboratory in 1992 and unveiled in 1993. It took De Beers researchers 600 hours to grow the stone, which was assessed to be of nongem quality due to large metallic inclusions. New Diamond Technology’s laboratory-cultivated product, grown in less than 300 hours, is a higher-quality type IIa nitrogen-free colorless diamond. The company’s experts conclude that it can be cut into a 7.5-carat to 8.5-carat, D to F color, VS clarity polished diamond. By comparison, the largest laboratory-created cut diamond produced to date by Pure Grown Diamonds, formerly Gemesis, the world’s principal producer of gem-quality lab-created diamonds and jewelry, had the following characteristics: 3.04 carats, I color and SI1 clarity. It carried a price tag of $23,012 in the company’s online store.
Russia’s most recent lab-grown record-setting diamond is 20.69 millimeters (mm) long, 17.3 mm wide and 11.80 mm high. Experimental technologies have been used in its production, and as the very first produced sample, the diamond includes imperfections, such as growth defects at the base of the stone. However, the top part of the stone — comprising 75 percent of the stone’s total volume — is a perfectly formed gem-quality monocrystal, according to the company. Based on the outcome of the experiment, New Diamond Technology projects that the new technology will allow the company to grow 40-carat to 50-carat diamonds in very reasonable time frames in the near future, and that it may facilitate the mass production of extra-large gem-quality laboratory diamonds. New Diamond Technology was established in mid-2014 by Inreal, one of Russia’s long-standing leaders in industrial-grade diamond and diamond powder production. Its purpose is mass production of large type IIa and type IIb diamonds. The company is equipped with 30 of the industry’s most powerful 5,000-ton High Pressure-High Temperature (HPHT) cubic presses. That is ten more presses than are operational at China’s Henan Huanghe Whirlwind International Co., Ltd., one of the world’s three-largest synthetic diamond manufacturers.
While the concern of the world’s diamantaires and miners about synthetic diamonds infiltrating the market of natural diamonds is a sensitive, and controversial, issue in the industry, Kolyadin, who also serves as Inreal’s chief executive officer (CEO), said the total production capacity of the present-day laboratory facilities is such that they pose no real threat to the natural diamond industry. “It wouldn’t be right to say that laboratory-grown diamonds have started to replace the natural mined stones in the jewelry industry for a number of reasons,” said Kolyadin. “First, the total number of companies that can grow colorless, single-crystal diamonds does not exceed a dozen. In addition, the average growth rate of lab stones is quite slow and it can take five full days to grow a 1-carat crystal. Finally, the world’s production capacities for laboratory-grown diamonds are still quite limited. There are fewer than 1,000 of the sufficiently powerful HPHT and chemical vapor deposition (CVD) units used to produce synthetic diamonds in the entire world.”
“The laboratory-grown crystals, because of their thermal conductivity and durability, can be used in aggressive and extreme environments,” Kolyadin continued. “Their main application is undoubtedly in the area of high technologies, such as electronics, optics, robotics, information technology (IT) and the aerospace industry. Making polished diamonds is just one application. But it is not a priority for our company.” Still, the recent pace of development achieved by the Chinese diamond-growing industry is very impressive. Kolyadin projects it might take only two to three years for the Chinese factories to realign their capacities from producing diamond powders, which is their main product today, to growing single-crystal diamonds. And if the technologies develop to the level where mass production of colorless crystals ranging in size from 800 microns to 3 mm — the main size range for natural diamonds cut in India — becomes possible, that is the point, Kolyadin concludes, at which synthetic diamonds could begin to have a real impact on the global industry of natural diamonds.Article from the Rapaport Magazine - May 2015. To subscribe click here.
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