| | It came to me in my sleep.Last night I was working a material science problem. The question was, prove the APF (atomic packing factor) of a hexagonal close packed structure is 0.74.
The atomic packing factor is simple. It's the volume which the atoms take up divided by the total volume of the hexagonal prism. Well to keep a long story short, In order to find the hexagonal prism I simply took the area of one equilateral triangle multiplied it by 6 (there are 6 of them in a hexagon) and then multiplied that by the height of the prism, or c. Well my answer kept coming to be about half of the 0.74 i was looking for. I couldn't figure out why! Well lucky for sleep and dreams I think I now know what it was. Simply put, I wasn't taking the right area of the triangles... The simplest thing seems to wreck the most havoc. Area of a triangle is 1/2*b*h and I was just taking b*h. WOW Anyway it was pretty exciting figuring that problem out. YES SIRSS.
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| | Posted 9/16/2007 3:07 PM - 2 comments
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