Bih-Yaw Jin

Statement

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.

Artworks

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.