Project title: Multiscale investigation of failure in bonded diamond aggregate

Supervisors: Daniele Dini,Daniel Balint,Adrian Sutton,and Serdar Ozbayraktar

Project description:

Element Six (E6) is the world's leading manufacturer of synthetic diamond for hard abrasive materials. Synthetic diamonds are used throughout many industrial applications such as cutting, grinding, drilling, and polishing. Polycrystalline diamond (PCD) is one of the E6 products that is formed by sintering diamond powders in the presence of the metallic catalyst. PCDs fail by cracking of diamond crystals under extreme conditions. The theory of fracture, indicates that the dislocations, impurities, and any imperfections present inside the diamond grains can affect their mechanical properties. PCDs contain various imperfections that might cause failure by producing nano-cracks in the system. The objective of the project is to shed light on the mechanisms that lead to these failures, involving different scale. Techniques at different length scale will be used to characterise possible mechanisms of nano-cracks initiation and propagation into macro-cracks inside the system.