In this study, amethod for determining the fracture of aggressive diamonds
was developed and applied to test three different types of conditioner
disks. Each disk was subjected to a 30-min accelerated fracture
test against an aluminum plate. For each disk, SEM images were taken
on the ten most aggressive diamonds before and after the test. Results
show that disk D3 has no aggressive diamonds with major fractures
while five and seven aggressive diamonds showed major fractures for
disk D1 and disk D2, respectively. The accelerated method provided
consistent results on the possibility of aggressive diamond fracture
compared to a regular 24-h wear test performed on a Dow® IC1000™
pad. Being able to provide efficient and effective differentiation among
different pad conditioners, thismethod can be used rapidly by ICmakers
and pad conditioner manufacturers for aggressive diamond fracture
characterization and quality assessment.