Sunday 18 October 2020

Why Wood is more important than Diamond in the whole universe


Here is another interesting video on Youtube from Science Loop: Why Wood is more important than Diamond in the whole universe.

Diamonds are one of the most precious materials on Earth. The whole universe has many materials. Is wood more precious than diamond in the whole universe?

Diamond is a solid form of the element carbon with its atoms arranged in a crystal structure called diamond cubic. At room temperature and pressure, another solid form of carbon known as graphite is the chemically stable form of carbon, but diamond almost never converts to it. Diamond has the highest hardness and thermal conductivity of any natural material, properties that are utilized in major industrial applications such as cutting and polishing tools. They are also the reason that diamond anvil cells can subject materials to pressures found deep in the Earth.

The arrangement of atoms in diamond is extremely rigid. Few types of impurity can contaminate it (two exceptions being boron and nitrogen). Small numbers of defects or impurities (about one per million of lattice atoms) color diamond blue (boron), yellow (nitrogen), brown (defects), green (radiation exposure), purple, pink, orange or red. Diamond also has relatively high optical dispersion (ability to disperse light of different colors).

Most natural diamonds have ages between 1 billion and 3.5 billion years. Most were formed at depths between 150 and 250 kilometers (93 and 155 mi) in the Earth's mantle. Under high pressure and temperature, carbon-containing fluids dissolved various minerals and replaced them with diamonds. Much more recently (tens to hundreds of million years ago), they were carried to the surface in volcanic eruptions and deposited in igneous rocks known as kimberlites and lamproites.

Synthetic diamonds can be grown from high-purity carbon under high pressures and temperatures or from hydrocarbon gas by chemical vapor deposition (CVD). Imitation diamonds can also be certainly made out of materials such as cubic zirconia and silicon carbide. Natural, synthetic and imitation diamonds are most commonly distinguished using optical techniques or thermal conductivity measurements.

Diamond can also found inside or outside the solar system ( Asteroid, Diamond planet, star etc.)

On the other hand, wood is a complex organic structure. Wood is a porous and fibrous structural tissue found in the stems and roots of trees and other woody plants.

Wood is an organic material - a natural composite of cellulose fibers that are strong in tension and embedded in a matrix of lignin that resists compression.

Wood is sometimes defined as only the secondary xylem in the stems of trees, or it is defined more broadly to include the same type of tissue elsewhere such as in the roots of trees or shrubs.

What is a xylem? (BOTANY) The vascular tissue in plants that conducts water and dissolved nutrients upward from the root and also helps to form the woody element in the stem.

Wood may also refer to other plant materials with comparable properties, and to material engineered from wood, or wood chips or fiber.

Wood has been used for thousands of years for fuel, as a construction material, for making tools and weapons, furniture and paper.


Above: The chemistry of Diamond and Graphite


The above image is from https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Advanced-in-Wood-Chemistry-Wang/7c255aef07a4f33d23d450c22e0579c1686c694e - Advanced in Wood Chemistry - You can see Other Figures and Tables from this paper

3 comments:

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  2. Thanks igobnews or sharing this 🙃.

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    1. Thanks. There are many different Diamond types out there. Diamond type is a method of scientifically classifying diamonds by the level and type of their chemical impurities.

      Diamonds are separated into 5 types:
      Type Ia
      Type Ib
      Type 1aB
      Type IIa
      Type IIb

      The impurities measured are at the atomic level within the crystal lattice of carbon atoms and so, unlike inclusions, require an infrared spectrometer to detect.

      Different diamond types react in different ways to diamond enhancement techniques. Different types can coexist within a single stone; natural diamonds are often mixes of Type Ia and Ib, which can certainly be determined by their infrared absorption spectrum.

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