Scientists Turn Plastic Into Diamonds In Breakthrough
Scientists Turn Plastic Into Diamonds In Breakthrough
The production of nanodiamonds from PET plastic paves the way toward a new form of recycling, and even has implications for exoplanets that rain diamonds.
By Miriam Fauzia
September 2, 2022, 2:09pm
More than a billion miles away from Earth, on the ice giants of Neptune and Uranus, diamonds are forever. This isn’t cosmic poetry, but a reasonable scientific conclusion: We know that under extreme pressures and high temperatures miles beneath a planet’s surface, hydrocarbons are pummeled into a crystalline bling coveted by the affianced. But on far-flung Neptune and Uranus, the Universe’s diamond-making process is a bit more curious. Since the 1970s, scientists believed that diamonds might actually rain down toward the mostly slushy planets’ rocky interiors—a diamond rain, if you will.
In 2017, researchers in Germany and California found a way to replicate those planetary conditions, fabricating teeny tiny diamonds called nanodiamonds in the lab using polystyrene (aka Styrofoam). Five years later and they’re back at it again, this time using some good ol’ polyethylene terephthalate (PET), according to a study published on Friday in Science Advances. The research has implications not only for our understanding of space, but paves a path toward creating nanodiamonds that are used in a range of contexts out of waste plastic.
So, why in the world are we making diamonds out of the same plastic that things like food containers and water bottles are made of? There’s a good reason for this, Dominik Kraus, a scientist at the German research laboratory Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf and lead author of the study, said in an email.
When Kraus and his colleagues first attempted making nanodiamonds with polystyrene—which contains the same elements of carbon and hydrogen found on Neptune and Uranus—they did so by bombarding the material with the Linac Coherent Light Source, a high-powered X-ray laser at the SLAC National Acceleratory Laboratory in California. This process rapidly heated the polystyrene to 5,000 Kelvin (around 8,540 degrees Fahrenheit) and compressed it by 150 gigapascals, similar to conditions found about 6,000 miles into the interior of the icy planets.
Much more at the link...
https://www.vice.com/en/article/3advqv/scientists-turn-plastic-into-diamonds-in-breakthrough?mc_cid=b3a1873b32&mc_eid=8a01db060a
❤️ pants
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