Wurtzite Structure

This project was submitted for the Spring 2019 3D Printing and Design Competition. Participants were asked to respond to the following prompt: “We want to know how you created your project, what inspired you, what you learned along the way, and where it might lead you. In short we want you to tell us the story behind the project and reflect on the process.”

Response:

My Chem 314 class has been recreating some of the original rock salt models made by the students of professor Moyer. These models help us visualize the tetrahedral and octahedral holes found in the crystal lattice structures for some common rock salts. Our model in particular is the Wurtzite structure, which has a hexagonal close packing and half of its tetrahedral holes filled by a metal ion. We wanted to preserve the work done by professor Moyer and his students so that plenty of future chemistry majors can use these models to learn about crystal lattice structures visually like we have. Created by RJ Chadha, Claire Grigglestone & William Patterson.