New Mexico making diamonds by explosions

Thursday, December 7, 2006
N.M. Tech Creates Industrial Ice Used to Produce Mirrors and Lasers
By Argen Duncan
El Defensor Chieftain Reporter

New Mexico Tech has been in the diamond-making business for the past two years, routinely creating what the school calls the finest industrial diamonds from hundreds of large explosions.

Working for the Colorado-based Dynamic Materials Corp., the Energetic Materials Research and Testing Center has been fabricating the best, hardest industrial diamonds with a patented process Dupont initially invented, said center Associate Director Michael Stanley in an interview.

The diamonds, which are a gray powder instead of sparkling stones, are used to make such things as mirrors and sapphire lasers.

The center has been conducting six to eight fabrication shots or explosions per month to make about 75 percent of Dynamic Materials' annual production of industrial diamonds.

The process uses about 9,000 pounds of an ammonium nitrate-based explosive. Workers pack the explosive and a pipe containing the diamond-making raw material (the composition is a company secret) into a 14-foot-tall steel culvert and set off the blast.

"It squeezes the pipe and provides the heat, the pressure to change carbon into diamonds," Stanley said.

Research engineer Tony Zimmerly said the company produces the pipe assembly and center employees don't know what is then placed inside.

Much of the information about the process is confidential.

The center recently set off its 62nd diamond-making explosion as members of the media and other visitors watched from almost 10,000 feet away.

After the explosion, a crater and the inner pipe sat in the ground at the site. The remnants of the outer culvert were small pieces in the crater and scattered in the powdery dust on the ground. Zimmerly said they don't find much of the culvert.

The heat from the pipe was felt from several feet away.

A company called Wesco makes the diesel-scented explosive in Gallup and delivers it in 1,000-pound bags for the process.

The diamond-making material comes from Albuquerque, and New Mexico businesses provide the shipping.

Stanley said people on the project were trying to keep the money in New Mexico to supply jobs.

He wasn't allowed to say how much Dynamic Materials Corp. pays per blast. "But I can tell you it keeps seven people employed, right now, about half time, doing this work," he said.

Dynamic Materials wants to transfer all its diamond making to Socorro and have the center do 80 to 110 blasts per year. Because the work doesn't come from the U.S. Department of Defense, Stanley said, federal funding cycles wouldn't affect it.

"It'll be very steady work," he said.

The company used to fabricate diamonds in an inactive Pennsylvania coal mine, but the cavern where workers set off the blasts kept expanding. An employee who had attended a safety course at New Mexico Tech remembered the school and approached the Tech group about taking on the work.

Stanley said the center tried a few blasts and, after waiting two or three months for grading and analysis of the product, found its explosions weren't yielding as much as the Pennsylvania shots.

Center staff members worked with the explosives company to increase the density of the explosive and then succeeded in producing the right yield.

In the coal mine, Dynamic Materials could only have one blast every other day because workers had to clean it out after each explosion.

On the center's range, technicians and engineers can set off two shots a day in the summer and one a day in the winter, because of atmospheric inversion layers, Stanley said.

The center didn't develop any part of the fabrication process.

"We're just taking their process and doing the shots for them," he said.
Eventually, Stanley said, center staff will look at the whole process and see if they can improve it by using different explosives or decreasing cost.