This post is abstracted from an article in Rapaport Magazine by Shaun Sim about technological advances in the diamond cutting industry. Historically, diamond cutters inspected stones for flaws with nothing more than a 10X loupe and their eyes. In the 1980s, computer applications began to aid them in locating flaws in a rough diamond but a window still had to be polished to reveal the interior of the stone.
In 2009, Sarin Technologies, based in Israel, introduced the first product in its line of machines that do inclusion mapping in rough diamonds. It was capable of scanning and mapping the inclusions in a rough diamond without needing to polish a window. Sarin’s machines now take a video of the exterior of the stone while using a scanner that maps the interior of it. It is similar to the magnetic resonance imaging used in hospitals and is a breakthrough in materials engineering.
The data from the video and scanned imaging is fed directly into another Sarin machine that is designed to facilitate the planning and cutting of the rough diamond. This machine offers options for visualizing the number of diamonds that can be cut from the rough stone and how the stone must be divided to optimize the number and size of the finished diamonds produced.
