Bih-Yaw Jin
Zeolites are aluminosilicate minerals consisting of periodic
arrangement of TO4 tetrahedral units, where T is an aluminum or
silicon cation and O is an oxygen anion. A vast zeolite frameworks can
be thought to exist of component building units, such as truncated
octahedra, prisms, etc, which again are made up of vertex-linked
tetrahedra with oxygen anions located at vertices. Here, we applied
the novel three-dimensional weaving method to build the sphere packing
models of the simplest zeolites, sodalite, by carefully chosen bead
chains. Each chain comprises a chain of beads held by a pre-stressed
elastic string. Spherical beads in these models represent oxygen
anions; while smaller cations hidden inside the tetrahedra are not
shown.
Sodalite structure can be thought to consist of the space filling
tessellation of truncated octahedra, also known as the bitruncated
cubic honeycomb, or the Kelvin structure. Our bead-chain sculpture
of sodalite can be considered as a generalized tensegrity
structure consisting of compressive hard sphere components packed
by tensile elastic strings.