Don't throw your love away...

Don't throw your love away you might need him someday. But now it is possible to actually make diamonds out of your ashes. To turn you into a diamond, LifeGem takes 8-ounces of your ashes. You are purified at about 6,000 degrees Fahrenheit. The high temperature vaporizes all of the noncarbon elements in your ashes and converts the carbon into crystallized graphite.

Pretty hot stuff, most of you has already been incinerated at 2,000 degrees, and now almost all of the little that was left vaporizes. Next, in a diamond press, your carbon is subjected to heat and hydraulic pressure. This causes the graphite to break down into individual carbon atoms and recrystallize as a diamond. The patented process takes about six months.

Can't my ashes be turned into diamonds?

Diamonds are forever - and so could you be
What more could any guy want than to be turned into that diamond that just finishes off a gorgeous girl's outfit. Maybe in a nice necklace or in a ring.

Diamonds are carbon. Your ashes will contain some carbon although it was not included in O'Neill's analysis.




However, there isn't much carbon in your ashes compared to the amount of Phosphate and Calcium. This is why the earliest - (circa 2002) - process to turn you into a diamond for one of your love's rings, employed incineration interruptus and a special carbon collection kit. The door of the cremation chamber is opened. Four ounces of tissue are removed from one of your organs and put in a special sealed conatiner. A cover is put on the container and it is placed back in the retort. At the end of the process the container is removed from the chamber. Your organ material has been reduced to dry, crispy flakes.

A crucible containing your carbon is placed in a vacuum induction furnace. All oxygen is pumped out from the furnace and the temperature sent up to 3000 degrees F. The high temperature removes impurities, but because their is no oxygen the carbon is preserved and transformed into graphite by the high temperature.

You (a little pile of graphite powder) are placed in a diamond press and subjected to 900,000 pounds per square inch at 3000 degrees F. The longer you stay in the press, the bigger the gem you turn into.

How much will be left of me?

A child may leave as little as 2.2 pounds (1Kg) ashes. The average man renders out to 7.4 pounds of cremains (3.4 Kg) and the average woman 5.8 pounds (2.6 Kg).




98% of people will fit in a 200 cubic inch urn (Cremation Association of North America survey). Apparently your ashes may fill more than one urn, especially if were a particularly large person. The further your remains are processed (powdered) the less volume you will occupy. If you were a fit young guy with denser bones, you will leave a greater volume of ash behind.

Cremation chemical

And the list goes on:

• Magnesium 0.418%
• Iron Oxide 0.118%
  

Plus Zinc,Titanium Oxide, Barium, Antimony, Chromium, Copper, Manganese, Lead, Tin, and Vanadium in much smaller quantities. Beryllium and Mercury will be present in minute quantities.

What will I be made of?

Cremation destroys all DNA. So all record of your individuality has gone up the chimney. Not much to be resurrected from now.




According to Gayle E. O'Neill, Ph.d. of TEI Analytical, Inc., your post cremation chemical composition will be:

• Phosphate 47.5%
• Calcium 25.3%
• Sulfate 11.00%
• Potassium 3.69%
• Sodium 1.12%
• Chloride 1.00%
• Silica 0.9%
• Aluminum oxide 0.72%
  

Cardboard casket

A cardboard casket will leave very little behind, but if you have been incinerated in a more traditional wooden casket, the operator will pick out any large chunks of charcoal from your ashes since they will turn your remains black in processing.




Alternatively, your ashes may go into a cooling chamber (a kind of large bucket), where jets of air blow away the remains of your casket.

What will be left of my casket?

If you are consumed in a cremator with a secondary hearth, your remains can be pushed into the secondary hearth and the charcoal from your casket can burn out there while the next cremation is starting.

Cremator with seconadary hearth

That expensive casket could be up to 50% of what is left behind. When your body and bones have been consumed, there may be a fair bit of charcoal particularly if you were incinerated in a large Oak or Cherry casket.




Since to burn out the charcoal from your casket will require a large amount of excess air that cools down the cremator - wasting stored heat which could have been used to incinerate the next person - the operator may not bother to finish burning the remains of the casket.

Scattered Ashes

You thought you were a hard man, but it might only take 2 minutes to powder your bones. However long it takes the end result is the same: you are reduced to a "sand-like fine powder". (Facultatieve make sure your ashes are no more than 3.2mm (1/8 inch) in diameter).




In this form, when you are scattered, the weather and biochemical action quickly break down your ashes to form part of the earth and within a short time there will be no trace of you.

TABO crembola

For those cremation geeks who want to know more about the crembola:



In the TABO crembola your ashes are put into a drum which is perforated like a sieve, so your ashes can only drop out when they have been ground small enough. The drum is rotated with an electric motor. During the first turn of the drum, the milling-balls, which later pulverize all that is left of you, are detached. Your pulverized remains fall, as you are ground down and down ever smaller and smaller, into an urn or pan. When the milling is finished, the drum momentarily ceases to rotate and then starts again in the opposite direction. The milling-balls are caught by a ball catcher and the scrap metal (nails from your casket, your artificial joints) is automatically emptied into a separate pan. Some crematorium use a ash "mill" with a flailing titanium chain, rather than metal balls, but the result is the same: you are ground smaller and smaller.




The process of powdering you can take up to 30 minutes, but the Facultatieve Technologies High Speed Cremulator will grind you up in two minutes.

Getting you into the cremulator....

Left. Remains of your cremated body as swept from the oven. Larger bone fragments are still identifiable. Part of your hip bone is being held up. Right Your bone fragments are swept into a cremulator to be ground into a uniform size.

Weakened bones.

The crematorium has not finished its work of destruction, just because 95% of you has gone up the chimney. Your ashes are superheated and glowing when they come out of the retort. But after you have cooled down you are poured into a cremulator (or "crembola") - which is essentially a rotating drum similar to a spindryer.



Heavy stainless steel balls, as large as tennis balls, powder your already weakened bones.

Crematory Owner

"..people expect nice white remains" (Crematory Owner) so you may have had extra burn time devoted to breaking down and whitening your bones. Your unprocessed cremains will be made up of fragments of your bones You will look like used kitty litter of the gravel (not the clumping) type. You will be neither a feathery ash nor a fine powder.

Color of ashes

When they rake you out of the furnace your cremains may be a grey and white mixture or dark grey (charcoal), with unburnt trabecular bone (bone with an internal latticework) showing up yellow.



If zinc had been used in the construction of your coffin, some of your cremains might appear slightly yellowed; if iron, green; if copper, pink. Metals in the jewelry you were wearing as you burnt up would also affect the color of your ashes.

What will I look like?

Your ashes may actually glow while they are still in the furnace. When you are cremated the protein matrix of your bones is completely consumed but the calcium remains in the form of calcium oxide or lime.




A gas flame impinging on calcium oxide produces an incandescence similar to that produced by a "limelight". Cool.
I always wanted to glow in the dark.

Ashes to Ashes

A man, when he burns, leaves only a handful of ashes. No woman can hold him. The wind must blow him away. (from The Rose Tattoo by Tennessee Williams).




I feel a little sad to think that all I may become is ashes (AnnaLee) This page considers what is left of you once the crematorium incinerator has done its work. It seeks to answer questions you might ask:

• What will my ashes (or as they are sometimes called cremains) look like?
• What will left of my casket?
• What will be left of me?
• How much will be left of me?
• Can my ashes be turned into diamonds?
• Will they be my ashes?

by : cremate-me.net

The bones

The ones of bones in the furnace are probably real. A contact from Canada tells me "Often the operator will use the rake to pull the remains to the area directly under the burner or airjets or in other units the remains are raked onto a secondary finishing hearth to finish burning down with the supplied heat from the next loaded case."



It is likely that the bones in the incinerator images were photographed this point.

The ignition of fat

The ignition of fat in a corpse may occur at a different point to the one given here. The books give a time between 5 and 20 minutes from the start of cremation. I also found some infromation Google Booking cremation. The following all provided some useful material: The Corpse: A History (Christine Quigley), Rising from the Flames (Albert Carter and Jane Petroand), The Archaeology of Human Bones, and Human Remains (Andrew Chamberlain). Although these books are not primarily about cremation, they do contain some interesting notes on the topic.

References

Jackie will probably be scattered in the crematorium grounds by a member of the crematorium staff. Or maybe she'll get a little columbarium niche for a few years...




The outline of the stages of cremation comes from Forensic Pathology by Vincent DiMaio and Dominick DiMaio pages 379 to 380. I have translated the technical medical language - hopefully without too much loss of accuracy. The timings are appropimate. Factors such as body size, type of coffin and type of retort affect cremation time. Information also came from Encyclopedia of Cremation (edited Douglas Davies and Lewis Mates) pages 132 to 135, and Death to Dust by Kenneth Iserson (Chapter 6).

Disposing of ashes

How much residue will Jackie leave in the ash box? Cremains typically weigh between 3 and 9 pounds (1.4 - 4.1 Kg). A person's height is the best predictor of the weight of their cremains. Jackie is about average female height when standing in stocking feet - so she'll probably leave behind the average amount of "ash" for a woman - 5.8 pounds (2.6 Kg).




The final volume of Jackie's residue depends on how finely it is ground down and how tightly it is packed in its container. A very small portion of Jackie's residue will be irritrievably lost during the pulverization process - a pity since there will be so little of her left.

By about one hour and a half hours after IGNITION

Jackie's remains fall through the perforated main hearth of the cremator into the lower hearth. (Exhaust gases will pass over these remains on their way to the chimney). From the lower hearth Jackie is raked into a trough called the ash refining hearth. Air supplied to the ash refining hearth will cool her bone fragments down. Finally a door in the ash refining hearth is slid open and Jackie is collected in an ash box.

By about one hour after IGNITION

• Head, what head? Only the core of Jackie's facial bones and the base of her skull are left.
• Jackie's organs have been reduced to ash.

About 30% of Jackie's skeleton will eventually be burnt up - the organic non-mineral part. Jackie's bones will break into fragments due to their rapid loss of water as they are heated. Most of the bone fragments that survive incineration will come from Jackie's heavier bones - her pelvis, lower vertebrae (the bony segments of her backbone), and skull (about 20% of the total). The bones in the female pelvis are are more delicate (thinner and lighter) than those in the male pelvis, so Jackie will have less pelvis to leave behind.

By about 45 50 minutes after IGNITION

There is a dramatic decline in the temperature inside the cremation retort. Although Jackie's remaining soft tissues will continue to burn for some time longer, much of the human tissue fuel she provided has been consumed.



The base of Jackie's skull is visible.
Except for her liver, Jackie's organs are unrecognizable. Jackie's arms are gone and her thigh bones reduced to calcined stumps.

By about 40 minutes after IGNITION

The back of Jackie's skull has broken and fallen away exposing her brain - a dark fused mass with a rather sticky consistency. Her brain is resistanting complete combustion, but it cannot resist forever. Her facial bones are free of soft tissue, calcined and disintegrating. The soft tissue of her neck is charred and will soon disappear completely. The organs in Jackie's chest and stomach are shrunken with a sponge like surface.

A fresh brain, it won't look this after 40 minutes in the incinerator.

By about 30 minutes after IGNITION

There are large gaping factures in Jackie's skull and the external layer of her skull is starting to fragment. The bones of her face have calcined and little of her facial soft tissue remains.
Jackie's stomach and chest cavities are exposed. Her internal organs are blackened and shruken, except for her intestentines, which although blackened at the front are still moist behind.

Her guts will burn fairly slowly, but her lungs even more slowly still. Her ribs are calcined at the front. Jackie's forearms have shruken. Her thigh bones are mostly free of soft tissue and her exposed leg bones calcined with extensive fractures and rolled up edges.

By about 20 minutes after IGNITION

The external "table" or layer of Jackie's skull shows long narrow cracks.
The skin of Jackie's chest has burned away. Her ribs are visible. The skin of Jackie's arms and legs has burned away. The exposed muscle is charred and the bones of her forearms are visible. The bones of her hands and feet can also be seen. They are calcined and connected by charred soft tissue. Even when her hands and feet fall away from her legs and arms they are still recognizable. Nevertheless, they will soon be completely destroyed.

By about 15 minutes after IGNITION

Jackie is 25 about percent fat. (The fat percentage for females is normally higher due to the breast tissue.) Her fat will fuel the fire, increasing temperature and so increasing destruction. The gas jets can certainly be turned off once Jackie's fat ignites since she will continue to burn in her own grease. Jackie's fat may start to evaporate.




This gasified fat will mix with the air and the inflammable mixture generate a large amount of heat - the temperature rising to 1100 degrees centrigrade. The higher temperature will generate more inflammable material. Jackie's combustion now becomes furious and there may be a discharge of smoke if it cannot be controlled.

After 10 minitues

As the water is driven out of Jackie, her muscles slowly contract, causing her thighs to steadily spread and her limbs to gradually flex. Jackie's tendons shrink as they too loose water and this could pull her into a fetal position.



Her stomach swells before the skin and abdominal muscles char and split; the swelling is due to the formation of steam and the expansion of gases in Jackie's guts.

By 10 minutes after IGNITION

The soft tissue on Jackie's face has been charred. Jackie's scalpe has burnt away revealing the top of her skull, which is not yet calcined. (Calcined bone is bone that has been so thoroughly heated that all moisture and grease is oxidized or driven off, leaving only white, easily crumbled pieces.)



All of Jackie's bone will eventually be calcined - only the mineral component of her bones will be left. Her bones will fragment into small pieces and distort due to rapid water loss.

From : cremate-me.net

IGNITION

The cremator door opens automatically and a the wall of heat spreads out from the chamber. Jackie's coffin is inserted into the furnace (using the automatic coffin loading machine) where it quickly catches fire, bulges and warps. As the wood from Jackie's coffin burns brown/grey smoke puffs out of the crematorium chimney.

The coffin sides collapse and fall, exposing Jackie to the direct effect of the flames. Time for her stockings to smoke and her toes to toast. Jackie's skin and hair scorch, char and burn. But Jackie is 65% water and there's a lot more wet material inside her that needs to dry out before it can burn.