Are diamond windows plausible?

Question

How transparent are diamonds exactly? How easily can we make/shape them industrially? I suppose if you wanted something transparent that must not be broken...?

Answer 1

sure if you wanted a 2x3 window for 10 million.

Answer 2

They'd be a great win for very high pressure use. As we learn more about the physics of carbon, they'll likely eventually become a possibility.



Transparency ranges from extremely good to clouded. Reshaping and machining is a problem; theyy are still by far he hardest substance known, natural or man-made, though they do have cleavage and fracture planes, otherwise one wouldn't be able to shape them at all. The best transparency would be those that are a single crystal, of course. Like quartz. Unlike glass, diamond has no amorphous structure.

Answer 3

If you wanted something transparent that must not be broken, diamond would be a lousy material. It might be hard, but it's rather brittle. You could shatter a diamond window much more easily than you could one made out of a material like lexan, which has notably more flexibility.



Now, if you want something transparent that must resist scratching, then it would come in handy, as you'd have a far harder time scratching it than you would with lexan.

Answer 4

Plausible, but why? Diamond only resists scratching, so you'd have a window that passes virtually 100% of the heat thru it but won't ever scratch, but watch out for baseballs! Diamond has perfect cleavage in 4 planes, meaning it can break easily.

Answer 5

Diamond is pretty hard to work with you need specialized diamond tipped tools for cutting it but i suppose they could try that in the future. Not with real diamonds of course as they would be 1, too expensive and 2, the crystals found are way to small. But maybe we could try it with man made artificial diamonds which have pretty much the same properties as the real thing,

Answer 6

Diamond is too brittle. It will also burn (at very high temperature).



Colourless quartz would be a better material, it's much less brittle than diamond and most things won't scratch it. It's also cheaper to make, I've seen some small slabs of synthetic quartz that would be big enough to go into a lead-light panel.



Colourless sapphire is another possibility, they use it in high end watch covers. It's harder than quartz too. I haven't seen any large specimens, though I suppose it wouldn't be more difficult than making synthetic quartz.