Crystal structure
Face-centered cubic
Body-centered cubic
Hexagonal close-packed
Types of solids:
Crystalline material: atoms self-organize in a periodic array
Single crystal: atoms are in a repeating or periodic array over the entire extent of the material
Polycrystalline material: comprised of many small crystals or grains
Amorphous: disordered lack of a systematic atomic arrangement
Crystalline Amorphous
SiO2
Crystal structures:
To discuss crystalline structures it is useful to consider atoms as being hard spheres with well-defined radii. In
this hard-sphere model, the shortest distance between two like atoms is one diameter of the hard sphere.
2R - hard-sphere model
We can also consider crystalline structure as a lattice of points at atom/sphere centers.
Unit cell:
The unit cell is a structural unit or building block that can describe the crystal structure. Repetition of the unit
cell generates the entire crystal.
Example: 2D honeycomb net can be represented by translation of
two adjacent atoms that form a unit cell for this 2D crystalline
structure
Example of 3D crystalline structure:
Different choices of unit cells possible, we will consider parallelepiped unit cell with highest level of symmetry
Metallic crystal structures:
Metals are usually (poly)crystalline; although formation of amorphous metals is possible by rapid cooling
As we learned in Chapter 2, the atomic bonding in metals is non-directional no restriction on numbers or
positions of nearest-neighbor atoms large number of nearest neighbors and dense atomic packing
Atomic (hard sphere) radius, R, defined by ion core radius - typically 0.1 - 0.2 nm
The most common types of unit cells are
faced-centered cubic (FCC)
body-centered cubic (BCC)
hexagonal close-packed (HCP)
Body-Centered Cubic (BCC) Crystal Structure (I)
Atom at each corner and at center of cubic unit cell Cr, -Fe, Mo have this crystal structure
Hexagoanal Close-Packed Crystal Structure (I)
HCP is one more common structure of metallic crystals
Six atoms form regular hexagon, surrounding one atom in center. Another plane is situated halfway up
unit cell (c-axis), with 3 additional atoms situated at interstices of hexagonal (close-packed) planes
Cd, Mg, Zn, Ti have this crystal structure
Close-Packed Structures (FCC & HCP)
Both FCC and HCP crystal structures have atomic
packing factors of 0.74 (maximum possible value)
Both FCC and HCP crystal structures may be generated by the stacking of close-packed planes
The difference between the two structures is in the stacking sequence
Single Crystals and Polycrystalline materials
Single crystal: atoms are in a repeating or periodic array over the entire extent of the material
Polycrystalline material: comprised of many small crystals or grains. The grains have
different crystallographic orientation. There exist atomic mismatch within the regions where grains meet.
These regions are called grain boundaries.
Anistrophy:
Different directions in a crystal have different packing. For instance, atoms along the edge of FCC unit cell
are more separated than along the face diagonal. This causes anisotropy in the properties of crystals, for
instance, the deformation depends on the direction in which a stress is applied.
In some polycrystalline materials, grain orientations are random, so bulk material properties are isotropic
Some polycrystalline materials have grains with preferred orientations (texture), so properties are dominated
by those relevant to the texture orientation and the material exhibits anisotropic properties.
Non-Crystalline (Amorphous) Solids
In amorphous solids, there is no long-range order. But
amorphous does not mean random, in many cases there is some form of short-range order.
