Gas-Phase Nucleation of Diamond Clusters upon a Sharp Rise in Temperature under Conditions of CVD Synthesis

It is shown that the predominant nucleation of diamond nuclei (instead of graphite ones) in plasma or hot-filament assisted CVD technology is due to a sharp increase in the temperature of the region of the initial gas mixture’s motion. The nucleation of diamond nuclei then occurs immediately in the gas phase. The reason for such predominant nucleation is high oversaturation by small hydrocarbon fragments in the gas mixture, due to a rapid change in temperature and substantial differences between the desorption of such fragments from the surfaces of nuclei and the oxidation of nuclei. A way is described of synthesizing massive diamonds without the use of high pressures and CVD technology in its traditional form.

Computational analysis of homogeneous nucleation and droplet growth applied to natural gas separators

A natural gas droplet is generated at certain thermodynamic conditions through three stages: supersaturation, where the gas has more molecules than it should have in equilibrium, forming “embryos” of liquid phase; nucleation, where embryos form groups of different shapes and sizes of nanometer order; and the droplet growth, where the number of molecules increases until equilibrium is reached. In this paper, the homogeneous nucleation and droplet growth of natural gas applied to gravitational separators operating at high pressure conditions (7MPa) are analyzed. The results showed that at a high pressure, the initial drop size reached was 8.024 nanometers and the final diameter of the drop was 4.18 micrometers.

On the Determination of Molar Heat Capacity of Transition Elements: From the Absolute Zero to the Melting Point

Molar specific heat is one of the most important thermophysical properties to determine the sensible heat, heat of transformation, enthalpy, entropy, thermal conductivity, and many other physical properties present in several fields of physics, chemistry, materials science, metallurgy, and engineering. Recently, a model was proposed to calculate the Density of State by limiting the total number of modes by solid–liquid and solid–solid phase nucleation and by the entropy associated with phase transition. In this model, the new formulation of Debye’s equation encompasses the phonic, electronic, and rotational energies contributions to the molar heat capacity of the solids. Anomalies observed in the molar specific heat capacity, such as thermal, magnetic, configurational transitions, and electronic, can be treated by their transitional entropies. Model predictions are compared with experimental scatter for transitional elements.

How volatile components catalyze vapor nucleation

Gas phase nucleation is a ubiquitous phenomenon in planetary atmospheres and technical processes, yet our understanding of it is far from complete. In particular, the enhancement of nucleation by the addition of a more volatile, weakly interacting gaseous species to a nucleating vapor has escaped molecular-level experimental investigation. Here, we use a specially designed experiment to directly measure the chemical composition and the concentration of nucleating clusters in various binary CO2-containing vapors. Our analysis suggests that CO2 essentially catalyzes nucleation of the low vapor pressure component through the formation of transient, hetero-molecular clusters and thus provides alternative pathways for nucleation to proceed more efficiently. This work opens up new avenues for the quantitative assessment of nucleation mechanisms involving transient species in multicomponent vapors.