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Ch.12 - Solids and Modern Materials

Chapter 12, Problem 33b

Consider the unit cells shown here for three different structures that are commonly observed for metallic elements. (b) Which structure(s) corresponds to the least dense packing of atoms?

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Hello everyone today. We are being asked to identify which units sell below has the least dense packing of atoms. And so what we want to do in this situation is we want to calculate the packing efficiency for each of these unit cells. So for a this is gonna be known as an end centered cubic And that was going to be 37% packing efficiency B is what's known as a face centered cubic. And that is going to have a packing efficiency of 74 and last but not least for C. This is known as simple cubic And that has a packing efficiency of 53%. And so the least dense packing will be the the cubic that has the smallest packing efficiency, which is cubic A. And so that is our final answer. Overall, I hope this helped until next time.