Diamonds Are An... Engineer's Best Friend?

Zirconia is a common tool in the ceramic engineer's toolbox, but have you ever heard of using diamonds? That's just what some researches are trying to use. Engineers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Surface Engineering and Thin Films IST in Braunschweig, Germany have created a material they've dubbed 'DiaCer,' which looks to offer superior wear-resistance and a low coefficient of friction.

Combining technical ceramics with diamonds makes sense since diamonds are incredibly hard, conduct heat well, and are mostly inert to chemical substances. By combining them with ceramics, there results an unsurpassed material resistant to heat, wear, corrosion, and chemicals. Researchers have found that adding a diamond coating to a ceramic pump extends the part's durability by a factor of 4 to 1,000. After being used to create several tons of wire, the test parts were barely worn at all.

Dr. Lothar Schäfer of the Fraunhofer Institute is confident. He's said,

“Using our process, we can apply a diamond layer of up to a half square meter in size. There‘s nothing else like it in the world. Ultimately, DiaCer is of interest for all components in machine construction that need strong resistance to wear."

The iPhone 4 To Use Advanced Ceramics?

It's looking more and more like there will be an update to Apple's venerable iPhone product. There are now scads of photos of the new phone--whether it's still in prototype stage or not is debatable--and it definitely looks different, as you can see from the photo above. Many tech pundits have pointed to a 2006 Apple patent filing,

A portable computing device capable of wireless communications, the portable computing device comprising: an enclosure that surrounds and protects the internal operational components of the portable computing device, the enclosure including a structural wall formed from a ceramic material that permits wireless communications through.

which indicates the company is at least looking at using a zirconia ceramic material for the backing. This move makes a lot of sense, since it a ceramic material can, of course, be made to be extremely strong and heat-resistant. And its structural nature allows for it to be much more conducive to being a phone body component than metal, which can interfere with radio waves.

It could be another high-profile coup for the technical ceramics industry if the great minds at Apple chose to use zirconia ceramics in its flagship device. I guess we can only wait and see!