Diamond coatings prevent mineral scale inside of industrial pipes

Amazing stuff! Diamonds are a man's best friend! 😊

"Industrial pipes carrying water or chemicals invariably get gunked up as deposits accumulate on their internal surfaces. That slows flow, and slowly damages the equipment, leading to the need for periodic maintenance and higher operational costs. ...

Now, researchers ... have hit upon a more effective solution to resisting scale formation: coatings made with lab-grown diamonds.

The material scientists note their chosen coating material can stay clean without regular intervention. Their work builds on previous studies which found that diamond, besides being incredibly hard and chemically stable, can also stave off bacterial growth. ..."

From the abstract:

"Mineral scaling, particularly gypsum deposition, remains a costly and persistent problem in industrial systems, lowering efficiency, raising energy demands, and accelerating equipment degradation.

Conventional chemical and mechanical mitigation methods are temporary and often introduce secondary environmental or operational concerns, underscoring the need for intrinsically scale-resistant materials.

Herein, we report a systematic investigation of polycrystalline diamond (PCD) films with varied surface terminations (oxygen, hydrogen, fluorine, or nitrogen) for their resistance to CaSO4 scaling. Nitrogen-terminated PCD (N-PCD) exhibits an order-of-magnitude reduction in Ca2+ accumulation compared with other terminations.

Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) reveals that N-PCD supports only sparse, dendritic gypsum crystallites, in contrast to the dense, continuous scale layers observed on other surfaces.

Consistently, adhesion force measurements confirm extremely low adhesion between the CaSO4 crystal and N-PCD.

Molecular dynamics and density functional theory simulations show that a strongly bound, ordered water layer forms on N-PCD, creating an energetic barrier that repels CaSO4 ions and suppresses heterogeneous nucleation.

Further enhancement is achieved by bulk nitrogen doping, which smooths the surface morphology and suppresses scale formation by up to 6-fold.

Finally, applying nitrogen functionalization to commercial boron-doped diamond (BDD) electrodes yields seven times lower scale loading without compromising electrochemical performance.

This combined experimental–theoretical study establishes nitrogen-functionalized diamond as a robust, durable platform for antiscaling coatings, with potential applications across water treatment, energy production, and other scaling-prone industries."

Diamond coatings prevent mineral scale in industrial pipes

Rice engineers show lab-grown diamond films can stop costly mineral buildup in pipes (original news release)

Nitrogen-Terminated Diamond Films for Antiscaling Coatings

A scanning electron microscope image of the Nitrogen-terminated diamond films for antiscaling coatings

Diamond Thermal Conductivity: A New Era in Chip Cooling

Amazing stuff! Diamonds are a chip's best friend!

"When you grow a micrometers-thick layer of diamond inside advanced chips, it spreads out the heat and drops the temperature more than 50°C."

"... But with great power comes great…heat! ...

In some ways, diamond is ideal. It’s one of the most thermally conductive materials on the planet—many times more efficient than copper—yet it’s also electrically insulating. However, integrating it into chips is tricky: Until recently we knew how to grow it only at circuit-slagging temperatures in excess of 1,000 °C.

But my research group at Stanford University has managed what seemed impossible. We can now grow a form of diamond suitable for spreading heat, directly atop semiconductor devices at low enough temperatures that even the most delicate interconnects inside advanced chips will survive. To be clear, this isn’t the kind of diamond you see in jewelry, which is a large single crystal. Our diamonds are a polycrystalline coating no more than a couple of micrometers thick."

Diamond Thermal Conductivity: A New Era in Chip Cooling - IEEE Spectrum "A micrometers-thick integrated layer spreads out the heat"

Gallium nitride high-electron-mobility transistors were an ideal test case for diamond cooling. The devices are 3D and the critical heat-generating part, the two-dimensional electron gas, is close to the surface.

Polycrystalline diamond could help reduce temperatures inside 3D chips. Diamond thermal vias would grow inside micrometers-deep holes so heat can flow from vertically from one chip to a diamond heat spreader in another chip that’s stacked atop it.