AMS Spring Southeastern Section Meeting Meeting #1079

Special Session on Discrete Geometry in Crystallography

University of South Florida, Tampa, March 10-11, 2012.

Meeting Link

Meeting Link

Slides

Group Photo

Lecture

Kinematics of Zeolites.  Preliminary report.

The kinematics of a model of interlinked tetrahedra which was described by
H. HARBORTH and M. MOELLER con-sisting of 16 congruent regular tetrahedra
connected via 32 spherical joints was recently investigated by P. FAZEKAS,
O. ROESCHEL and the presenter. It was found that although the Gruebler formula
gives a theoretical degree of freedom of negative 6 for this kinematic chain,
and therefore the model should be rigid, this mechanism admits at least a
two-parametric self-motion in the general position. Saturated packings of
tetrahedra are used to model Zeolites, which
are microporous, aluminosilicate minerals. They have some interesting properties
which we attempt to explain mathematically. (Received January 10, 2012)