In a recent work, Borucki et al. [7,8] found that among the several
tens of thousands of diamonds present on the surface of a conventional
diamond conditioner, the percentage of “active diamonds” (i.e., those
diamonds that actually work and do the pad cutting) was typically
less than 1%. The remaining diamonds, which either did not touch the
pad surface or merely supported the load of the disk, were referred to
as “inactive diamonds”. The work also reported that all “active diamonds”
were not the same as only a small fraction of them, referred
to as “aggressive diamonds” did more than 80% of the cutting of the pad.