Crystal Structure Part 1

Week-3

Reference: James F. Shackelford

Introduction
A majority of engineering materials are crystalline in nature. A crystal is the arrangement of atoms in a regular, periodic fashion in the three-dimensional space. Glasses are non-crystalline and many common polymers may have 50100% volume of their structures as non-crystalline. The smallest structural unit of a crystal is known as the unit cell which when repeated can describe the entire crystal structure.

Why are we interested in studying crystal structures?

Seven Basic Crystal Systems

A schematic unit cell showing the corresponding lattice constants or parameters.

Seven Basic Crystal Systems (Contd.)

Metals have simpler cubic or hexagonal close packed structures whereas ceramics, polymers and semiconducting compounds tend to have complex crystal structures.

Fourteen Bravais Lattices

Crystal Structures - Metals

Cubic crystal structures: a) Simple cubic or primitive cubic b) Body-centered cubic (BCC) c) Face-centered cubic

Coordination no. (BCC): 8

Note that simple cubic crystal structure is rare in metals. Ex: -Po No. of effective atoms/unit cell = 1 Atomic packing factor: 0.52 Coordination number: 6

Crystal Structures - BCC

Atomic Packing Factor/APF (or packing efficiency) = Volume of atoms in the unit cell/Unit cell volume APF for BCC = 0.68 (Lets calculate!) Also, theoretical density of any element (or compound) can be calculated provided we know the Bravais lattice, lattice constant and atomic mass. We will calculate the theoretical density of -Fe during the class.
The packing efficiency of BCC is only 68%. Then what is there in the rest of the space of the unit cell. The rest space is known as interstitial space or site!

Crystal Structure FCC

(http://phycomp.technion.ac.il/~sshaharr/cubig-gif.html#fcc)

FCC: - Effective no. of atoms/unit cell = 4 - APF = 0.74 - Coordination no. = 12

Close Packing in FCC

Stacking sequence in FCC is

ABCABCABC..

Hexagonal Close Packed (HCP) Structure

HCP: Co-ordination number is 12 Number of atoms per unit cell is 6 Atomic packing factor of 0.74

HCP Slip Systems

Pyramidal plane

HCP Crystal Structure

Ideal c/a ratio in hcp is
Element Beryllium (Be) Yttrium (Y) Hafnium (Hf) Ruthenium (Ru) Alpha-Titanium (-Ti) Alpha-Zirconium (-Zr) Rhenium (Re) Cobalt (Co) Magnesium (Mg) Zinc (Zn)

8 1.633 3
c/a 1.568 1.571 1.581 1.582 1.588 1.593 1.615 1.624 1.624 1.856 Primary Slip System Basal Prismatic Prismatic Prismatic Prismatic Prismatic Basal/Prismatic Basal Basal Basal

Cadmium (Cd)

1.886

Basal

HCP Close Packing

HCP

FCC

(http://www.nd.edu/~amoukasi/CBE361/Chapter_3_ad.pdf)

Relationship between a and r