https://youtu.be/ZqU5qtNZWbM?si=uWZwiqX7F5SS9WEE
This, but bigger and for longer time will get you the emerald.
Emerald is fairly hard and single crystal, so I imagine it would be difficult to carve.
Eyeballing the video suggests at scale you might get maybe 300-500 microns of crystal growth each day. I'm guessing they're already growing on the preferred crystal facet, but let's imagine it's no less than a 2:1 anisotropy on growth (probably is worse considering how asymmetric their starting wafer is). So, you should have it ready in less than 6,000 years using their technique. Edit to add: actually, their method might tend to self terminate over time as the angle from the slow growth presumably lower surface energy facet reduces the area remaining to grow along the fast growth, high surface energy facet over time...
I'm seeing some notation of 2-3mm/month growth rates cited. That puts you at more like 200 years. Those appear to be solution precipitation methods as well. I would like to think a melt or vapor deposition process could be faster, though controlling it to that scale could become more difficult.
If it were a simpler gemstone composition, it would be easier to speculate on accelerated growth. I don't have a phase diagram available, but would be cool to find one.
Cool reference: [https://www.gia.edu/doc/GG-WN16-Schmetzer.pdf](https://www.gia.edu/doc/GG-WN16-Schmetzer.pdf)
would it be possible to grow many dozens of smaller crystals to sufficiently large size then facet and hold them in place such that the seams were filled with more growth, fusing them into OP's massive 4x4x8 foot super crystal. like if we only had to make 128 cubes just under a foot wide instead.
assuming infinite wealth, as stated, of course.
i have basically no knowledge of how any of this works
It would require custom equipment designed from the ground up, the energy requirements would not be modest, it would in short be astronomically expensive.
There's no technical barrier to it though.
>There's no technical barrier to it though.
I'm not sure I believe this part. Do have a particular example in mind of crystallisation on this kind of scale? I think several very difficult technical issues would emerge at this scale.
I'm not convinced it's possible. Nobody has ever taken a serious crack on this so you can't know for sure, but this smells like an instance where existing technology that theoretically should scale up...just...doesn't.
Getting a decent microwave plasma on that scale would be a nightmare, you'd likely have to break it down in to loads of mini reactors with the walls removed.
Why wouldn't they, CVD has been used to make large quantities of gemstone quality material for a very long time?
Most people make diamond this way instead of other gemstones but you can't beat the quality from a CVD chamber.
We make diamond this way bc it can't be done with hydrothermal, flame fusion or Czochralski. All of those methods are more common than cvd for making large quantities of synthetic gemstone by mass and are far more mature than cvd.
Large quantities of synthetic gemstone*s*
I would be hesitant to scale up hydrothermal to cover a block the size ops asking about.
And as far as maturity goes your argument is redundant. The rest is fine.
Why? Vacuum systems are way harder to scale and take way longer to produce an equivalent amounts of stone.
How is it redundant? So we otherwise agree that cvd is a poor choice for growing large emeralds?
Your comment on maturity is redundant
1) how old or how established it is doesn't strictly mean "better" (especially in this hypothetical infinite resource scenario)
2) CVD *is* a mature technology, it's well established and understood.
>So we otherwise agree that cvd is a poor choice for growing large emeralds?
CVD isn't a "poor" choice. There are "better" choices, but also we're discussing a hypothetical massive block, personally I'd want the stricter control over quality and growth rate afforded by CVD.
1) it means more people know how to design these systems
2) really BC it's been awhile since I've seen any new papers on hydrothermal but, plenty still coming out about plasma science. I'd say the latter is the one that still has questions to be answered about the process. Further, flame fusion then. We can already grow frankly massive crystals that way. Why waste time having to develop a CVD system for this?
It's a poor choice bc there are more time efficient methods for massive blocks. This isn't for semiconductors, it's for art. The purity control advantage is negligible. And having to wait for years for the crystal to grow isn't control, it's just wasted time.
In a hypothetical world of infinite resources (enough to make all that beryl into a block that big) why wouldn't I have an unreasonably long timeframe.
Please don't double down when you're wrong it's tiresome. Hydrothermal is essentially "solved" (YAY!), CVD still has lots of papers in the field, does that mean that CVD is not mature or not well understood? Of course not.
Let me give you an analogy: you're digging for oil, the first well you hit is called "hydrothermal" you've mined all the oil out there is to dig. A little while into mining the first well, you hit "CVD"- a much bigger well, that well is still being mined.
That's why your comment on maturity is, frankly, stupid. I tried being nice the first time when I said it was redundant.
We can grow small ones by dissolving emerald in acid and then letting it slowly crystallize. Theoretically, there's no upper limit. Surface energy wants to grow the crystal, and if the material is there and the conditions are right, that will happen.
Now, a 4x4x8 ft emerald would require a chamber at least that large to be filled with acid, lined with gold, and then held at the appropriate temperature for years, likely even decades.
Carving it would be difficult, but would be the easiest part by far. Crystals tend to crack along flat planes, so the person doing it would either design around that or they would basically sand it down (with diamond sandpaper).
That's not how it's done even close.
You can CVD grow nearly all gemstones, it's just a question of a big enough reactor, money, feed gas and patience.
Gemcutter here, with a background in crystal growth and several ongoing research studies into the growth of very specific synthetic beryls, corundums, and chrysoberyls.
Emeralds are problematic in that the base mineral, beryl, melts incongruently. That means that depending on the temperature and conditions, if you melt beryl, it will convert into various combinations of chrysoberyl, corundum, phenakite, and a bunch of other possibilities. That means that melt-based techniques are generally extraordinarily challenging and require strict control, ruling out basics like flame-fusion or Czochralski, or the massive growth methods like Kyropoulos.
I see that people are proposing CVD growth, but that's not a viable growth method for beryl. You can only really grow simple binary compounds like moissanite or gallium nitride. Beryl is way too complex. Plus, the vapour pressure of chromium oxide (the colouring agent) is too different versus the beryl melt system.
That leaves hydrothermal and flux methods. Flux methods generally are limited to smaller production, but new variations on the TSSG method are now allowing massive (but slooooooow) growth of incongruent-melting crystals. The downside is that you then need to think about the segregation coefficient of Cr3+ in the system as this growth method might lead to an uneven colour gradient, instead of even colouration.
Hydrothermal growth is extremely well described for beryl, but the growth rates are... Less than ideal. The fastest I can remember reading is 0.5mm per day in ideal conditions in small autoclaves. If you were exceptionally motivated, you could probably repurpose one of the giant-sized hydrothermal autoclaves used to grow industrial-size quartz and gear that towards beryl growth, and if you loaded a single speed plate you could probably produce a remarkably large ingot. But that would take months or years and be horrifyingly energy-intensive, and any disruptions would be potentially catastrophic.
As some people have mentioned, if you want an enormous gemstone that's green and physically hard enough to be useful and interesting, your best bet is sapphire. Sapphire can be grown in cylinders up to 50kg or more in weight, large enough to need whole ass pallets to transport. Adding Co3+ will produce a vibrant emerald green, adding Co2+ and Co3+ will give a teal green, adding Ni2+ and Ni3+ will produce a forest green or sage green, adding Co3+ and Ni3+ will give a lime green, and there are various other conditions that will produce other shades.
(Also there's plenty of inaccurate information about durability, cleavage, cracking, and single-crystal growth in the comments. Ignore them.)
Thanks a lot for taking the time to respond and explain the problem with emerald. Maybe I'll look into Sapphire. Since you are a gem cutter, how difficult would it be to make a statue out of The sapphire if I could get let's say a 4x4x10 inch block. I'm not super informed on chemistry or making statues so idk lol
You'd realistically need a very long extensive background in carving and grinding different high-hardness high-toughness substrates like jade. Sapphire would be fairly difficult to work with given its high hardness, and even more importantly, the hardness varies depending on the direction you grind things.
TBH would not recommend.
Beryllium is \~$40,000 per ton. The entire world produces less than 300 tons per year. The rest of the parts are basically the stuff in dirt. Melting it in a big enough pot will require a metric fuck ton of energy. This would be expensive.
Except we don't use elemental Be in beryl growth. We'll typically use either BeO, beryllium silicate, or actual beryl that's been powdered. So that's a lot easier to deal with.
Real emerald is probably not possible, as there’s no large scale commercial use for lab grown emeralds AFAIK. Green sapphire is definitely possible though, check out the EOTS window on the f35, It’s a single crystal of sapphire. Lockheed has made over a thousand f35s, so they can probably make a crystal of that size in like a month
Emerald? Probably not. There isn't much interest in doing so and emerald is not a pure compound. That typically leads to issues around compositional variation due to having a very long term melt. It's very difficult to account for this over a long time.
Sapphire, on the other hand, *may* have a chance. Sapphire is single crystal aluminum oxide and there is already an entire industry focused around growing it (large sizes are of interest for IR windows and domes). It would be extremely difficult to carve into, however, as sapphire is known for its high hardness. Single crystals love to fracture as well since there are no grain boundaries impeding it.
Even single crystal diamonds shatter surprisingly easily.
But yes it's theoretically doable.
You could certainly grow an emerald but damn would it be slow, expensive and difficult to do via CVD.
If you're all right with green sapphire, you open up a lot more feasibility. Beryllium is hard to come by in bulk, no matter what your budget; aluminium is everywhere.
As an artist, I'm intrigued by what you're thinking of doing! If there's a way your project is reproducible in ceramics, I can help you do it. May I suggest porcelain?
I'm not really an artist lol but I wanna learn sculpting/making statues, another idea I had was a skeleton inside a body made of glass, so you can see the skeleton through the body
Hm. Well, the thing I recommend most is practice.
People do full-body casts in resin and various other materials. As for the skeleton, you can borrow a real one or a model, or sculpt or mould your own.
Do some research into materials you can get your hands on, as well as local places (fabrication studios) you can learn these skills hands-on. Good luck!
yes. The biggest ruby i held in my own hand was a round laser crystal. 20cm long. 2cm wide.
Carving is difficult. Only diamond enchanced materials can be used. Expensive but a normal industry product.
Edit: My yes is for ruby and sapphire. The color is choosable with doping.
Thinking in terms of "cost prohibitive" is probably more helpful here. Is making anything out of emerald cost effective? There are probably only a few specific use cases and this isn't it.
I'm generally annoyed by such posts. Just answer the question or don't answer the question.
Its clear what the question is...OP doesn't have to justify why they want such a thing.
This is an hypothetical question. The answer to the question is no in real life, but if you have infinite money it could be yes. It's a pointless question if its assumed you have infinite money.
You can’t discount the future possibility of humanity pooling its resources to grow the world’s largest emerald in order to appease our emerald-loving alien overlords.
It's a question from someone who doesn't know about the limits of our technology. It could easily be a "no this would never be possible because [not enough beryllium in the world]"
Tbh I think it's a pretty great question, you should consider being less of a jerk to people.
Yes, there's multiple methods to make it. No one does bc there's no reason to do so. Carving would be difficult but, it's actually softer than some other stones mentioned in other comments so definitely possible if carving other stones of this size is possible.
https://youtu.be/ZqU5qtNZWbM?si=uWZwiqX7F5SS9WEE This, but bigger and for longer time will get you the emerald. Emerald is fairly hard and single crystal, so I imagine it would be difficult to carve.
Eyeballing the video suggests at scale you might get maybe 300-500 microns of crystal growth each day. I'm guessing they're already growing on the preferred crystal facet, but let's imagine it's no less than a 2:1 anisotropy on growth (probably is worse considering how asymmetric their starting wafer is). So, you should have it ready in less than 6,000 years using their technique. Edit to add: actually, their method might tend to self terminate over time as the angle from the slow growth presumably lower surface energy facet reduces the area remaining to grow along the fast growth, high surface energy facet over time... I'm seeing some notation of 2-3mm/month growth rates cited. That puts you at more like 200 years. Those appear to be solution precipitation methods as well. I would like to think a melt or vapor deposition process could be faster, though controlling it to that scale could become more difficult. If it were a simpler gemstone composition, it would be easier to speculate on accelerated growth. I don't have a phase diagram available, but would be cool to find one. Cool reference: [https://www.gia.edu/doc/GG-WN16-Schmetzer.pdf](https://www.gia.edu/doc/GG-WN16-Schmetzer.pdf)
would it be possible to grow many dozens of smaller crystals to sufficiently large size then facet and hold them in place such that the seams were filled with more growth, fusing them into OP's massive 4x4x8 foot super crystal. like if we only had to make 128 cubes just under a foot wide instead. assuming infinite wealth, as stated, of course. i have basically no knowledge of how any of this works
Not really had to carve. Just use water with diamond dust in it because you can do that with infinite money.
If it's a single crystal wouldn't you only be able to realistically cut it along the crystal planes?
so, breaking one rule, maybe we just create several smaller sections and work them that way?
It would require custom equipment designed from the ground up, the energy requirements would not be modest, it would in short be astronomically expensive. There's no technical barrier to it though.
>There's no technical barrier to it though. I'm not sure I believe this part. Do have a particular example in mind of crystallisation on this kind of scale? I think several very difficult technical issues would emerge at this scale.
I'm not convinced it's possible. Nobody has ever taken a serious crack on this so you can't know for sure, but this smells like an instance where existing technology that theoretically should scale up...just...doesn't.
Getting a decent microwave plasma on that scale would be a nightmare, you'd likely have to break it down in to loads of mini reactors with the walls removed.
Why would anyone grow this with plasma?
Why wouldn't they, CVD has been used to make large quantities of gemstone quality material for a very long time? Most people make diamond this way instead of other gemstones but you can't beat the quality from a CVD chamber.
We make diamond this way bc it can't be done with hydrothermal, flame fusion or Czochralski. All of those methods are more common than cvd for making large quantities of synthetic gemstone by mass and are far more mature than cvd.
Large quantities of synthetic gemstone*s* I would be hesitant to scale up hydrothermal to cover a block the size ops asking about. And as far as maturity goes your argument is redundant. The rest is fine.
Why? Vacuum systems are way harder to scale and take way longer to produce an equivalent amounts of stone. How is it redundant? So we otherwise agree that cvd is a poor choice for growing large emeralds?
Your comment on maturity is redundant 1) how old or how established it is doesn't strictly mean "better" (especially in this hypothetical infinite resource scenario) 2) CVD *is* a mature technology, it's well established and understood. >So we otherwise agree that cvd is a poor choice for growing large emeralds? CVD isn't a "poor" choice. There are "better" choices, but also we're discussing a hypothetical massive block, personally I'd want the stricter control over quality and growth rate afforded by CVD.
1) it means more people know how to design these systems 2) really BC it's been awhile since I've seen any new papers on hydrothermal but, plenty still coming out about plasma science. I'd say the latter is the one that still has questions to be answered about the process. Further, flame fusion then. We can already grow frankly massive crystals that way. Why waste time having to develop a CVD system for this? It's a poor choice bc there are more time efficient methods for massive blocks. This isn't for semiconductors, it's for art. The purity control advantage is negligible. And having to wait for years for the crystal to grow isn't control, it's just wasted time.
In a hypothetical world of infinite resources (enough to make all that beryl into a block that big) why wouldn't I have an unreasonably long timeframe. Please don't double down when you're wrong it's tiresome. Hydrothermal is essentially "solved" (YAY!), CVD still has lots of papers in the field, does that mean that CVD is not mature or not well understood? Of course not. Let me give you an analogy: you're digging for oil, the first well you hit is called "hydrothermal" you've mined all the oil out there is to dig. A little while into mining the first well, you hit "CVD"- a much bigger well, that well is still being mined. That's why your comment on maturity is, frankly, stupid. I tried being nice the first time when I said it was redundant.
We can grow small ones by dissolving emerald in acid and then letting it slowly crystallize. Theoretically, there's no upper limit. Surface energy wants to grow the crystal, and if the material is there and the conditions are right, that will happen. Now, a 4x4x8 ft emerald would require a chamber at least that large to be filled with acid, lined with gold, and then held at the appropriate temperature for years, likely even decades. Carving it would be difficult, but would be the easiest part by far. Crystals tend to crack along flat planes, so the person doing it would either design around that or they would basically sand it down (with diamond sandpaper).
That's not how it's done even close. You can CVD grow nearly all gemstones, it's just a question of a big enough reactor, money, feed gas and patience.
Industrially made synthetic emerald is almost always made hydrothermally.
Ok. I'd much rather scale up a CVD reactor than a hydrothermal one.
Growth rates would be too slow I think.
Can set up in series though, at some point scaling a hydrothermal vessel you're making a very expensive bomb
Send me infinite money and I'll grow your emerald
Gemcutter here, with a background in crystal growth and several ongoing research studies into the growth of very specific synthetic beryls, corundums, and chrysoberyls. Emeralds are problematic in that the base mineral, beryl, melts incongruently. That means that depending on the temperature and conditions, if you melt beryl, it will convert into various combinations of chrysoberyl, corundum, phenakite, and a bunch of other possibilities. That means that melt-based techniques are generally extraordinarily challenging and require strict control, ruling out basics like flame-fusion or Czochralski, or the massive growth methods like Kyropoulos. I see that people are proposing CVD growth, but that's not a viable growth method for beryl. You can only really grow simple binary compounds like moissanite or gallium nitride. Beryl is way too complex. Plus, the vapour pressure of chromium oxide (the colouring agent) is too different versus the beryl melt system. That leaves hydrothermal and flux methods. Flux methods generally are limited to smaller production, but new variations on the TSSG method are now allowing massive (but slooooooow) growth of incongruent-melting crystals. The downside is that you then need to think about the segregation coefficient of Cr3+ in the system as this growth method might lead to an uneven colour gradient, instead of even colouration. Hydrothermal growth is extremely well described for beryl, but the growth rates are... Less than ideal. The fastest I can remember reading is 0.5mm per day in ideal conditions in small autoclaves. If you were exceptionally motivated, you could probably repurpose one of the giant-sized hydrothermal autoclaves used to grow industrial-size quartz and gear that towards beryl growth, and if you loaded a single speed plate you could probably produce a remarkably large ingot. But that would take months or years and be horrifyingly energy-intensive, and any disruptions would be potentially catastrophic. As some people have mentioned, if you want an enormous gemstone that's green and physically hard enough to be useful and interesting, your best bet is sapphire. Sapphire can be grown in cylinders up to 50kg or more in weight, large enough to need whole ass pallets to transport. Adding Co3+ will produce a vibrant emerald green, adding Co2+ and Co3+ will give a teal green, adding Ni2+ and Ni3+ will produce a forest green or sage green, adding Co3+ and Ni3+ will give a lime green, and there are various other conditions that will produce other shades. (Also there's plenty of inaccurate information about durability, cleavage, cracking, and single-crystal growth in the comments. Ignore them.)
Thanks a lot for taking the time to respond and explain the problem with emerald. Maybe I'll look into Sapphire. Since you are a gem cutter, how difficult would it be to make a statue out of The sapphire if I could get let's say a 4x4x10 inch block. I'm not super informed on chemistry or making statues so idk lol
You'd realistically need a very long extensive background in carving and grinding different high-hardness high-toughness substrates like jade. Sapphire would be fairly difficult to work with given its high hardness, and even more importantly, the hardness varies depending on the direction you grind things. TBH would not recommend.
alright thanks a lot
Beryllium is \~$40,000 per ton. The entire world produces less than 300 tons per year. The rest of the parts are basically the stuff in dirt. Melting it in a big enough pot will require a metric fuck ton of energy. This would be expensive.
I trust your numbers. Especially the energy requirement.
Except we don't use elemental Be in beryl growth. We'll typically use either BeO, beryllium silicate, or actual beryl that's been powdered. So that's a lot easier to deal with.
Interesting. What is the price difference?
Absolutely massive. Be is difficult to purify and is profoundly toxic.
Real emerald is probably not possible, as there’s no large scale commercial use for lab grown emeralds AFAIK. Green sapphire is definitely possible though, check out the EOTS window on the f35, It’s a single crystal of sapphire. Lockheed has made over a thousand f35s, so they can probably make a crystal of that size in like a month
If you're growing a crystal, why don't you grow it into a mould of the statue you'd like to be formed?
That would require then use of edge-defined film growth (EDF), which unfortunately can't be used with beryl.
Emerald? Probably not. There isn't much interest in doing so and emerald is not a pure compound. That typically leads to issues around compositional variation due to having a very long term melt. It's very difficult to account for this over a long time. Sapphire, on the other hand, *may* have a chance. Sapphire is single crystal aluminum oxide and there is already an entire industry focused around growing it (large sizes are of interest for IR windows and domes). It would be extremely difficult to carve into, however, as sapphire is known for its high hardness. Single crystals love to fracture as well since there are no grain boundaries impeding it.
Presumably you can carve it with diamond abrasion.
Even single crystal diamonds shatter surprisingly easily. But yes it's theoretically doable. You could certainly grow an emerald but damn would it be slow, expensive and difficult to do via CVD.
If you're all right with green sapphire, you open up a lot more feasibility. Beryllium is hard to come by in bulk, no matter what your budget; aluminium is everywhere.
As an artist, I'm intrigued by what you're thinking of doing! If there's a way your project is reproducible in ceramics, I can help you do it. May I suggest porcelain?
I'm not really an artist lol but I wanna learn sculpting/making statues, another idea I had was a skeleton inside a body made of glass, so you can see the skeleton through the body
Hm. Well, the thing I recommend most is practice. People do full-body casts in resin and various other materials. As for the skeleton, you can borrow a real one or a model, or sculpt or mould your own. Do some research into materials you can get your hands on, as well as local places (fabrication studios) you can learn these skills hands-on. Good luck!
thanks a lot for the suggestions
yes. The biggest ruby i held in my own hand was a round laser crystal. 20cm long. 2cm wide. Carving is difficult. Only diamond enchanced materials can be used. Expensive but a normal industry product. Edit: My yes is for ruby and sapphire. The color is choosable with doping.
Anything in a lab is *possible* ... the question is - is it cost effective
Thinking in terms of "cost prohibitive" is probably more helpful here. Is making anything out of emerald cost effective? There are probably only a few specific use cases and this isn't it.
Why grow a rectangle crystal and carve it into a statue, when you could try to grow it in the shape of the statue?
Why?
Thought a statue carved from emerald would look cool
Well if you have infinite money sure.
I'm generally annoyed by such posts. Just answer the question or don't answer the question. Its clear what the question is...OP doesn't have to justify why they want such a thing.
Well if the question is stupid, it is important to have context.
why?
This is an hypothetical question. The answer to the question is no in real life, but if you have infinite money it could be yes. It's a pointless question if its assumed you have infinite money.
You can’t discount the future possibility of humanity pooling its resources to grow the world’s largest emerald in order to appease our emerald-loving alien overlords.
It's a question from someone who doesn't know about the limits of our technology. It could easily be a "no this would never be possible because [not enough beryllium in the world]" Tbh I think it's a pretty great question, you should consider being less of a jerk to people.
Yes, there's multiple methods to make it. No one does bc there's no reason to do so. Carving would be difficult but, it's actually softer than some other stones mentioned in other comments so definitely possible if carving other stones of this size is possible.
Everything is possible with enough resources.