Bih-Yaw Jin

Professor
Department of Chemistry, National Taiwan University
Taipei, Taiwan
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 composite building units, such as truncated octahedra, prisms, etc, which again are made up of vertex-linked tetrahedra with oxygen anions located at vertices. In previous Bridges conferences, we have demonstrated that the bead-chain construction set can be employed to build the sphere packing sculptures of a few tetravalent frameworks such as diamond and sodalite, which can be considered as the space filling tessellation of truncated octahedra, through suitable 3D weaving processes.
Interlocked Bead-Chain Model of Zeolite A Structure
Interlocked Bead-Chain Model of Zeolite A Structure
50 x 50 x 50 cm
20mm wooden beads
2019
Zeolite A, also known as LTA, can be viewed as a space filling tessellation of cubes, truncated octahedra, and truncated cuboctahedra, also known as the cantitruncated cubic honeycomb. Here, a novel 3D weaving method is used to build the sphere packing models that contains eight unit cells (2x2x2) of Zeolite A using carefully chosen bead chains with two different lengths. 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.