Video: The Machine ‘Reimagining’ Diamond Polishing | National Jeweler

Video: The Machine ‘Reimagining’ Diamond Polishing

It’s called the Fenix and is said to polish diamonds 10 to 20 times faster than can be done by hand.

Antwerp--Diamond companies in Antwerp are testing a machine that will automate a process done largely by hand since the 15th century. The Scientific and Technological Research Center for Diamonds (WTOCD), the research arm of the Antwerp World Diamond Centre (AWDC), recently announced the development of the Fenix, which fully automates the diamond polishing process and has created what industry leaders in Antwerp are calling a “game-changer” for the city. Antwerp, once a hub for diamond manufacturing, has seen the majority of those jobs gravitate to markets where labor is cheaper, like India. But the development of the Fenix “fundamentally changes the diamond polishing process,” AWDC CEO Ari Epstein said. “Today’s wages simply make it too expensive to conduct this labor-intensive job in our country. Fenix puts an end to this and can therefore be a real game-changer for the Antwerp diamond industry.” The AWDC said the machine can polish a diamond 10 to 20 times faster than a human can by hand, meaning a stone that would take a diamond polisher all day can be completed in about an hour and a half. It cuts according to the map provided to it by the person (or machine) that has examined the stone and decided the best way to polish it. What the machine can’t do, however, is cut multiple diamonds from a single piece of rough. Michael Geelhand de Merxem, project manager at AWDC, said there is no cap on the carat size of diamonds the Fenix can polish; if a large piece of rough is going to be cut into a single stone, then the Fenix can be used. But it can only cut one polished diamond per rough stone so users would not, for example, put a 400-carat diamond in there and expect the machine to cut multiple polished diamonds from that rough. The Fenix is currently being tested by a number of diamond companies in Antwerp (the AWDC declined to provide specific names) but is expected to be fully functional and ready for market by the end of the year. Geelhand de Merxem said the AWDC is still in the process of determining the machine’s market price. “While the technology itself is definitive—our tests having confirmed the exceptional performance of the Fenix in the lab—we still need to conduct extensive testing as to how the machine will perform in an actual production environment

Fenix, Diamond Manufacturing Reinvented. from DiamondsLoveAntwerp on Vimeo.

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