Author Topic: Diamonds Are Forever...and For Fighter Aircrafts Too!!  (Read 917 times)

glacier_71

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Diamonds Are Forever...and For Fighter Aircrafts Too!!
« on: March 15, 2009, 09:17:58 AM »
Diamonds: A fighter pilot's best friend?

Diamond windows offer thermal conductivity, transparency range, strength

by Eric Bland(Discovery Channel)

The U.S. Air Force may soon be adding some serious bling to its aircraft, in the form of windows made from 80-carat diamonds.

In theory, the windows would protect jets from high-powered microwaves (HPMs) they would themselves produce. The Air Force is vague on the details, but HPM devices aboard a jet could be used to disrupt or destroy enemy electrical systems. The problem is, they could also disrupt systems on board the jet itself.

That's where the diamond comes in.

"In general, windows such as these are required to shield sensors or sources from outside environments," said William Mitchell, a physicist and project manager at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio. "Diamond is special because it has a very high thermal conductivity, a very wide transparency range, and is strong. These three qualities are difficult to find in any other material."

The proposed windows would be 2.5 inches across and weight between 15 and 17.5 grams.

"Those weights correspond to between 75 and 87 carats," said Mitchell. "For comparison, the Hope Diamond in the Smithsonian is 45.5 carats."

The diamond-based aircraft windows would differ from the Hope Diamond in two big ways.

The first is that the Hope Diamond is a single crystal. The Air Force diamonds would be polycrystalline, with many very tiny diamonds put together. As long as the individual diamonds that make up the larger diamond are much smaller than the wavelength of light shining through them, the diamond's superior optical qualities are maintained, said Mitchell.

The second big difference is how the diamonds are formed.

Instead of crushing a chunk of carbon over millions of years deep in the Earth, the diamond windows will be created in several weeks by spraying carbon atoms over a silicon substrate in a high-pressure chamber, a process known as chemical vapor deposition.

Companies like Apollo Diamond and Gemesis specialize in creating the synthetic diamonds that the Air Force is interested in. Apollo Diamond CEO Patrick Doering said his company plans to submit an invited proposal to the Air Force for the project.

"The critical thing is that you don't want a lot of absorption [of high-powered microwaves]," said Doering. "What can happen is that if a material absorbs too much heat its properties can change, it might absorb more heat, and then you get this runaway situation."

Within seconds, a cloudier material like glass would melt or shatter from the microwaves passing through it.

Combine diamond's optical and thermal properties with its physical strength, more than enough to withstand bird strikes and other physical stresses encountered during flight, and you have a material uniquely suited for a new weapon capable of destroying unshielded electrical systems.

When high-powered microwaves encounter an electrical system, they cause a short-lived but overwhelming power surge.

An electrical system struck by an HPM, or its better-known cousin, the electromagnetic pulse, simply stops working. There is no explosion or sound. Incoming missiles or other aircraft that encounter HPMs, in theory, would just drop out of the sky.

Mitchell says that it typically takes about 10 years for new materials or technology to make it into commercial or military devices, so diamond-encrusted aircraft won't be flying over battlefields anytime soon.


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fdaray

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Re: Diamonds Are Forever...and For Fighter Aircrafts Too!!
« Reply #1 on: March 20, 2009, 08:34:43 AM »
Diamonds are not forever

Physicists in Germany have created a material that is harder than diamond. Natalia Dubrovinskaia and colleagues at the University of Bayreuth made the new material by subjecting carbon-60 molecules to immense pressures. The new form of carbon, which is known as aggregated diamond nanorods, is expected to have many industrial applications (App. Phys. Lett. 87 083106).

The hardness of a material is measured by its isothermal bulk modulus. Aggregated diamond nanorods have a modulus of 491 gigapascals (GPa), compared with 442 GPa for conventional diamond. Dubrovinskaia and two of her co-workers - Leonid Dubrovinky and Falko Langenhorst - have patented the process used to make the new material.

Diamond derives its hardness from the fact that each carbon atom is connected to four other atoms by strong covalent bonds. The new material is different in that it is made of tiny interlocking diamond rods. Each rod is a crystal that has a diameter of between 5 and 20 nanometres and a length of about 1 micron.

The group created the ADNRs by compressing the carbon-60 molecules to 20 GPa, which is nearly 200,000 times atmospheric pressure, while simultaneously heating to 2500 Kelvin. "The synthesis was possible due to a unique 5000-tonne multianvil press at Bayerisches Geoinstitut in Bayreuth that is capable of reaching pressures of 25 GPa and temperatures of 2700 K at the same time," Dubrovinskaia told PhysicsWeb.

The Bayreuth team measured the properties of the samples with a diamond anvil cell at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility at Grenoble in France. These measurements indicated that ADNRs are about 0.3% denser than diamond, and that the new material has the lowest compressibility of any known material.

In addition to working out why the new material is so hard, the Bayreuth team also hope to exploit its industrial potential. "We have developed a concept for innovative technology to produce the novel material in industrial-scale quantities and now we are looking for partners in order to realize our ideas," said Dubrovinskaia.
About the author

By Michelle Jeandron is a placement student on Physics World magazine.


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glacier_71

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Re: Diamonds Are Forever...and For Fighter Aircrafts Too!!
« Reply #2 on: March 20, 2009, 09:27:26 AM »
mao-mao tingali nas ilang gam-on, sir, para gamiton sa ilang aircraft, no?

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fdaray

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Re: Diamonds Are Forever...and For Fighter Aircrafts Too!!
« Reply #3 on: March 20, 2009, 11:06:57 AM »
Diamonds are not forever.  All earthly things, living or non living  will decompose.

It is technically not possible for it to go on "forever" what people mean by that is that the universe is constantly expanding. Which is to say that the end of the universe is constantly and steadily getting further away but is still in fact an end. Remember balance is the only thing that keeps everything intact. With every beginning there is an end.


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