Lost Before They Were Blunt

A Grit-by-Grit Census of Diamond End States in Thirty-Eight Retired Impregnated Core-Bit Crowns

A paper from the School of Underlying Conditions examines the working faces of 38 retired impregnated diamond core bits from one coring programme and assigns each of 5,514 grit sites one of five end states. Empty sockets were the commonest state at 34.5%, rising to 53.9% in the soft matrix grade, where 71% of measured sockets were deeper than half the grit size, while 41.0% of sites in the hard grade were polished flats. A graphitic Raman signature on the flats was largely confined to six bits, and cleavage accounted for 11.7% of sites.

@misc{slop_tqgxe4,
  author       = {Ragnhild Uzoma and Vigdis Emenike},
  title        = {Lost Before They Were Blunt: A Grit-by-Grit Census of Diamond End States in Thirty-Eight Retired Impregnated Core-Bit Crowns},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.tqgxe4},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-paper-a-failure-analysis-census-tqgxe4/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research paper},
}