Dimensional analysis of the impact toughness test for synthetic diamond grits

The method, in which a few carats of diamond grits are placed inside a capsule together with a steel ball, shaken for a number of times, and the unbroken ratio of the grits is then used to evaluate the quality of the diamond, has been well established for many years. However, the unbroken percentage, in an equivalent view, represents the impact toughness of the grits and cannot reflect the value of the crushing energy. Most of the previous empirical formulas obtained from experiments by scholars cannot be applied to practical tests. In this paper, a dimensional analysis was applied to investigate the impact toughness experiment, and the dimensionless relationship has been built among those variables such as the toughness index, the impact time, the impact frequency and the crushing energy per unit area. According to the results of a large number of experiments with synthetic diamond grits of mesh size 45/50, the percentage of the broken grits H is proportional to the impact time T^1.14 when the impact frequency is 2 400 r/min, and the impact frequency f^2.576 when the number of impacts is 2 000.