Scientists are developing technology that will turn plastic waste into diamonds!

Scientists have found a way to make diamonds from used plastic bottles. This is a technology that will help reduce plastic waste.

This recycled nanodiamond has a wide variety of applications, including medical sensors and drug delivery.

A team of scientists from the Helmholtz Dresden Rosendorf Center (HZDR), the University of Rostock, and the French Polytechnic School designed an experiment at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) at the National Accelerator Laboratory in California. About the phenomenon of “diamond rain” on ice giant planets like Neptune and Uranus.

Inside the icy giant planets, temperatures reach several thousand degrees Celsius and pressures are millions of times higher than Earth’s atmosphere.

It is thought that these conditions can break down the hydrocarbons and then compress the carbon part into diamonds that go deep into the planet’s cores.

To mimic this process, scientists fired high-power lasers at polyethylene terephthalate (PET), a hydrocarbon commonly used in disposable packaging, and found that the shock waves produced by these flashes grew tiny structures like a diamond.

“Polyethylene terephthalate has a good balance of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen to mimic the activity on icy planets,” says Dominic Krause, a physicist at the Helmholtz Center Dresden Rosendorf (HZDR) and a professor at the University of Rostock.

A mixture of compounds consisting of hydrogen and carbon is known to exist about 5,000 miles below the surface of Uranus and Neptune.

It contains methane, a single-carbon molecule bonded to four hydrogen atoms, which causes Neptune’s characteristic blue color.

In a 2017 study, the National Accelerator Laboratory team successfully simulated the diamond precipitation process for the first time by firing an optical laser at polystyrene.

Polystyrene has also been used to mimic the structure of methane because it contains only hydrogen and carbon.

The intense X-rays produced shock waves within the material, and the scientists observed the incorporation of carbon atoms into tiny diamond structures a few nanometers in diameter.

“It’s more complicated within the planets. There are many chemicals in the mix. So what we want to know here is what kind of effect these additional chemicals have,” said Siegfried Glenzer, director of the High Energy Density Division at the center. For the Stanford Linear Accelerator.

In addition to carbon and hydrogen, ice giants are believed to contain large amounts of oxygen.

Scientists have sought to explore the effect of oxygen on the formation of nanodiamonds on Neptune and Uranus. To do this, they repeated their previous experiments with a film of polyethylene terephthalate (PET) plastic — a hydrocarbon that also contains oxygen — which more accurately reproduces the formation of planets.

They used a high-power optical laser at the center of the Stanford Linear Accelerator to heat the sample to 6000 degrees Celsius. This triggered a shock wave that compressed the material to a million times atmospheric pressure within a few nanoseconds.

Using a method called X-ray diffraction, the scientists rearranged the atoms in small regions of the diamond and also measured the size and speed of their growth.

They found that with oxygen in the material, nanodiamonds can grow at lower pressures and temperatures than previously observed.

said Dr. “The effect of auxin is to accelerate the separation of carbon and hydrogen, thereby promoting the formation of nanodiamonds. This means that carbon atoms can more easily combine to form diamonds,” Krause said.

Scientists expect that the diamonds inside Neptune and Uranus are actually much larger than these experiments made, possibly weighing millions of carats.

This assumption can be supported by the fact that for thousands of years, the ice giants “actually rained diamonds” inside them.

In addition to diamonds, the team found evidence in experiments that “superionic water” can form inside planets. This occurs when water molecules are broken as a result of high temperature and pressure.

The oxygen atoms form an ordered lattice structure where the remaining hydrogen atoms can float around and conduct electricity when charged. The currents brought about by this peculiar water phase may explain the unusual magnetic fields of Uranus and Neptune.

These findings, published in Science Advances, may affect our understanding of ice giants outside our solar system that may experience the same phenomenon.

Since the presence of oxygen makes diamond formation more likely, it is possible that it also occurs on other planets under their own unique internal conditions.

Scientists plan to run similar experiments on samples containing ethanol, water and ammonia, all found on Uranus and Neptune, to come closer to simulating what would happen on other planets.

Source: Daily Mail