Customizable Crystallographic Building Block by mechadense

Last crawled date: 3 years, 1 month ago

This is a structural construction kit.
It uses a natural set of construction blocks which can fill/divide space.
These blocks are based on natural basic crystal structures with high symmetries. This makes the construction kit more direction independent then conventional ones.
user defined blocks:
Generate more building blocks (& couplers bricks) by entering the
coordinates of the local nearest neighbours. (Only if the entered nearest neighbours are correctly taken from a proper crystal structure the resulting body will form a solitary space filler.)
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A web seach revealed this strongly related kit:http://www.georgehart.com/rp/FCC.html
Science:
The basic blocks are the Wiegner-Seitz cells of the following crystal lattices
bcc - body centered cubic
fcc or ccp - face centered cubic or cubic closed packed
hcp - hexagonal close packed
some other voroni cells (e.g. one of a diamond atom) are also included
Future application:
In atomically precise products such blocks can incorporate diverse basic functions and be used as recomposable microcomponents that can form diverse metamaterials.
Choosing these shapes might be desirable because of the ease to reason about them and their good physical properties.
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E.g. in bcc cells:
Easy reasoning:
cube faces - kartesian
octahedral faces - normal to diamond bonds (choosing a main crystal orientation for the housing structure might be sensible)
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Good properties:
not too anisotropic
edges have no sharp only oblate angles
surfaces of aggregates form pockets so Van-der-Waals assembly can easily be used (Van-der-Waals forces can be pretty strong - way stronger than most would intuitively expect)