From the plastic bottle to the diamond. Space experiment opens up new perspectives for waste recycling
What is garbage for one person can become a treasure for another, and in a literal way. An experiment with purposes related to the space study has obtained nano diamonds by hitting the material used by the plastic bottle by a laser beam.
Researchers at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in California intended to recreate the "diamond shower" phenomenon that occurs inside Neptune and Uranus. Inside these giant ice planets are temperatures of several thousand degrees Celsius, and the pressure is millions of times higher than that of the Earth's atmosphere. Under these conditions it is believed that hydrocarbons change their molecular structure until they turn into diamonds.
To mimic this process, scientists fired a high-powered laser on polyethylene terephthalate (PET) plastic – a hydrocarbon material commonly used in single-use packaging – and witnessed the growth of diamond-like structures.
PET has a good balance of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen to simulate the activity of ice planets, ”said Dominik Kraus, HZDR physicist and professor at the University of Rostock.
A high-power optical laser at SLAC's Linac Coherent Light Source was used for the experiment to briefly heat a thin PET film to 10,800 ° F (6,000 ° C). This generated a shock wave that compressed the material for a few nanoseconds, up to a million times the atmospheric pressure. The combination of high temperature and pressure has generated the nanodiamonds, among other things thus theoretically proving the hypothesis of the "Diamond Rain" of the outer planets. in the case of Uranus, however, the basic hydrocarbon is the abundant methane, which, among other things, gives the planet a bluish color.
This discovery opens an interesting path to the study of new solutions for the production of diamonds for industrial use, a constantly growing market that could be positively combined with the recycling of plastics. You never know what technology holds.
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The article From the plastic bottle to the diamond. Space experiment opens up new perspectives for waste recycling comes from ScenariEconomici.it .
This is a machine translation of a post published on Scenari Economici at the URL https://scenarieconomici.it/dalla-bottiglietta-di-plastica-al-diamante-esperimento-spaziale-apre-nuove-prospettive-per-il-riciclo-dei-rifiuti/ on Sat, 03 Sep 2022 11:54:06 +0000.