Diamonds Are A Space Station's Best Friend

strredwolf writes: "Research is being done to replace standard solar cell pannels commonly used in satelites with one's made with diamonds. Supposedly, they would be more durable to conditions in space, as well as generate more power at the same cost. Same cost? The kicker is that they're not using gem-quality diamonds. Article on Beyond 2000, which amazingly is still around." Note: this is still a work in progress, not a finished technology, but if it pans out, this offers several benefits over traditional solar cells.

Comments

Diamonds are cheap

[Animats]

Industrial diamonds average about $4 per carat. And those are for stones; grit and such runs around $0.50/carat. (A carat is about 1/5 of a gram.) Synthetic industrial diamonds are available in sheet stock for use as heat sinks. Diamond substrates for semiconductors have been considered before, but never really took off.

The price of gemstone diamonds is propped up by the increasingly frantic efforts of the De Beers Consolidated Selling Organization Ltd, the people behind the "A Diamond is Forever" promotion. But that's for gemstones. Most industrial diamond is synthetic.

DeBeers is currently fighting attempts by synthetic diamond manufacturers to move into gemstones. They fear a repeat of the star sapphire debacle. Around 1970, Linde Chemical started manufacturing and promoting synthetic star sapphires, using the name The Linde Star. They glutted the market and the price of sapphires went way down. Then Linde exited the business, and others took the price even lower.

Interesting, but...

[efuseekay]

The prime cost of putting things into space is not material, but the rockets you build to put them up there. Diamonds are much more dense than silicon or GaAs (the solar cell of choice in space nowadas, so the article is kinda wrong), so they will be correspondingly more massive.

Sure diamonds may have higher efficiency, but what they should also worry about is Watts/mass, not just efficiency. As long as W/m of GaAs is higher, they should think hard before switching.

Still, ranting over, it's a real cool technology. Imagine, building a zillion nano-vacuum tubes!

Value of Diamonds

[NSupremo]

The worldwide diamond market is cornered by ONE COMPANY. (Someone find the name for me, thanks.)

They carefully control the quantity and quality of diamonds released to the public so that the level of supply and demand remains constant.

There are so many diamonds available that if even a fraction of them were released the value of diamonds would fall to nothing.

If it were not for this fact, I would assume that synthetic diamonds would be far more expensive than real ones.

But I feel synthetic gems would be required for manufacturing since you would have a billion identical.