The Diamond Research Laboratory (DRL), Element Six, Ekurhuleni, received this award for its research and development of new and state-of-the-art materials for a variety of purposes employing diamonds.
Dr Serdar Ozbayraktar and his team at the DRL are the pioneers of new technology involving super-abrasive polycrystalline diamonds (PCDs) which have extreme properties that are highly desirable for use in cutting just about anything.
“The target applications are currently abrasive applications such as metal cutting, machining, wood-working and oil and gas drilling as well as grinding tools for polishing such diverse materials as glass and granite,” says Ozbayraktar.
“We serve the aerospace, manufacturing, automotive, mining, construction, electronics and energy supply industries.”
When it comes to drilling, the DRL’s work has helped revolutionise the way this is done by speeding it up, enabling drilling companies to drill both deeper and faster in their search for oil and gas.
“In order to drill for oil and gas the drill must go down at least three to four kilometres. So the last thing a drilling team wants to do is pull out the entire drill string assembly in order to replace the drill bit,” explains Ozbayraktar.
“In drilling, time is money. Onshore drilling projects cost around $150 000 a day to run, and for offshore projects that cost rises to $500 000 a day, so you can’t afford to lose any production time,” he says.
“The drilling companies need to drill faster and deeper. To do this they need the best quality diamond drill bits and we are developing technology and producing diamond tools which have a much longer life span, allowing companies to drill without having to pull out and replace worn bits.”
It’s a technology which has its fiscal rewards as well, representing a sales revenue of around a couple of hundred million dollar per year.
“Diamond products that are currently under development represent the next generation of cutting products,” says Ozbayraktar.
“Polycrystalline products -— made from micro-metre-sized diamond crystals ‘welded’ together using the same process to form diamonds —- are used in the metal cutting, drilling and woodworking industries,” he explains.
“In woodworking the main application is chipboard with a hard coating or laminate on top used primarily for furniture manufacture and wood flooring. PCD tooling is the most robust and economically viable solution for such applications. The life span of a diamond tool is far greater than a traditional tungsten carbide tool. Diamond tools can cut cleanly for up to three months at a time, which can represent an effective 100 fold tool-life improvement.”
The diamonds used in the production of these tools are synthetic, produced under enormous pressure of 55 000 bars and at extremely high temperatures of between 1 400 and 1 600 degrees Celsius. Such a process replicates in a few minutes what Mother Earth took a millennium.
Some metal -— usually cobalt, nickel or iron (as a catalyst) —- together with graphite is used to synthesise diamonds.
Element Six produces around 500-million carats a year in South Africa, which is not bad when you consider that global industrial diamond consumption is between three and four billion carats.
While the abrasive applications of the diamond are well documented, diamond has various interesting properties, as Ozbayraktar explains.
“It has amazing electrical, thermal and optical properties. Electrical properties of diamond make it both an exceptional insulatoras well as, in combination with other materials, a semi-conductor,” he says.
“Thermal properties of diamond are so much better than any other materials that diamond heat sinks and heat spreaders represent enormous potential in the computer technology industries. In power generation there are a vast number of applications for diamond products such as high-power circuit breakers. Electrodes made from boron doped diamonds (which resist chemical attack) can be used in critical industries such as water treatment.”
As far as South Africa is concerned, more traditional areas such as abrasion technology offer the greatest potential.
“We are designing new products and materials to improve the performance of diamond products and to introduce them in such diverse areas as water purification, armoured components and prosthetics,” says Ozbayraktar.
Originally from Turkey, Ozbayraktar came to the University of the Witwatersrand 22 years ago to complete his PhD. He joined the DRL as a research scientist 18 years ago and became the general manager in 2003.
“We now have the biggest research and development complement in the diamond industry, including production facilities in China, Ireland, Sweden, Germany and the Ukraine. Together with other Element Six research nodes across the world, the DRL is coordinating research efforts and is playing a leading role in global super abrasives research and development,” he says.