IMX Seminar Series - New Materials & Process for Luxury Watches & Jewelry

High-end watches and jewelry are large consumer of precious metals and required more and more advanced materials in order to improve products attractiveness in terms of quality and aesthetics. Therefore, development of new precious alloys and processes have been carried out at Richemont R&I during the last four years in order to address this issue. The topics that will be developed into this talk will be related to the colors of precious metals, either the standard 18 carats gold with color ranging from yellow to red or others unusual colors that could be achieved, and the improvement of strength of alloys through the severe plastic deformation process. Researches are also carried out on non-precious metals and the development of bulk metallic glasses watch cases will be detailed.

Bio: Frederic Diologent is materials research and innovation director for the luxury goods group Richemont, where Frederic animate a team who brings new materials and process to watches and jewelry products.
He received a Master in physics from the University of Rouen and a PhD in Metallurgy from the University of Paris Sud and from the French aerospace lab (ONERA). From 2002 to 2009 he worked as researcher at the ETHZ and EPFL on nickel-based superalloys, titanium aluminides, gold alloys, copper alloys, metallic foams and aluminum alloys. After a first experience in industry in 2009 in the solar energy he joined the group Richemont in 2011 within Cartier Horlogerie and then in 2014 moved to R&I to launch the materials lab. Authors or coauthors of more than 40 publications and patents he always try to pushed lab’s research into industry.