Crystalline Structure-

Perfection
Crystalline Structure- are the atoms of the
material arranged in a regular and repeating
manner. The Crystalline Structures of most
metals belong to one of three relatively simple
types and these are;

• Ceramic Compounds
• Noncrystalline
• Elemental Semi-Conductors
3.1 Seven Systems and Fourteen Lattices
• Lattice Constants and Lattice Parameters- refers to as the length of unit-cell
edges and the angles between crystallographic axes. All possible structures
reduce to a small number of basic unit-cell geometries, which is
demonstrated in two ways;
1. There are only seven unique unit-cell shapes that can be stacked together to
fill three-dimensional space.
2. We must consider how atoms (viewed as hard spheres) can be stacked
together within a given unit cell.
3.2 Metal Structures
• With the structural ground rules behind us, we can
now list the main crystal structures associated with
important engineering materials. For our frst group,
the metals, this list is fairly simple
the body-centered cubic (bcc) structure, which is the bodycentered cubic Bravais lattice
with one atom centered on each lattice point. There is one atom at the center of the unit
cell and one-eighth atom at each of eight unit-cell corners.
 face-centered cubic (fcc) structure, which is the fcc Bravais
lattice with one atom per lattice point. There is one-half atom
(i.e., one atom shared between two unit cells) in the center of
each unit-cell face and oneeighth atom at each unit-cell corner,
for a total of four atoms in each fcc unit cell.
3.3 Ceramic Structures
-The wide variety of chemical compositions of
ceramics is reflected in their crystalline structures.

ceramics with the simplest chemical formula, MX,

where M is a metallic element and X is a nonmetallic
element. Our first example is the cesium chloride
(CsCl) structure shown in Figure 3.8
FIGURE 3.8 Cesium chloride (CsCl) unit cell showing (a) ion
positions and the two ions per lattice point and (b) full-size
ions. Note that the Cs+ - Cl - pair associated with a given lattice
point is not a molecule because the ionic bonding is
nondirectional and because a given Cs+ is equally bonded to
eight adjacent Cl -, and vice versa. [Part (b) courtesy of
Accelrys, Inc.]
3.7 X-Ray Diffraction

Diffraction is the result of radiation being scattered by a regular

array of scattering centers whose spacing is about the same as
the wavelength of the radiation.