Monday, August 8, 2011

Buckyball made of 60 dodecadedra

I made this structure with beads last weekend. Still unfinished. The finished structure should have 60 dodecahedra arranged like a buckball. One has two ways to interpret this structure:
1. If every dodecahedron represents a carbon atom, we have a standard C60.
2. If we still use beads to represent CC bonds, then we have a giant molecule, C750. In this molecule, 450 carbon atoms are sp3 hybridized or tetra-valent and 300 atoms are sp2 hybridized or trivalent. But I suspect these sp2 hybridized carbon atoms are not energetically favorable, so it is better to have hydrogen atoms connected to these sp2-carbons. Then we get C750H300!



The bead model of this structure (see here) might be first constructed by Emilie. She asked me to comment about this structure in my blog long time ago (I couldn't find the exact location though).

I decided to make one from beads after I saw the same structure made by a toy designer, Dick Esterle, who actually invented this kind of toys, in the Bridges conference last week.



3 comments:

Chuang Chern said...

saw this on the desk in the lab today. It's gorgeous.

dick esterle said...

Hi _ That's one big soccer ball. I wanted to link you to my youtube site where I show the Space Chips being used to build the First Five Drons (Platonic Solids) and 2 Combo-Drons (Archimedean Solids) and a rolling C60.
http://www.youtube.com/user/youarespace
_ Dick Esterle

thebeaedmolecules.blogspot.com said...

Hi, Dick,

Nice to hear from you. How do you like these photos of you and your Space-Chip buckyball?

Bih-Yaw