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Structure, Bonding & Material Type Synthlet

Electronegativity plus valency can be used to predict a binary material's structure, bonding & material type with good – but not perfect – accuracy using a semi-quantitative van Arkel-Ketelaar Triangle + Laing Tetrahedron. Read about the logic behind the model on the previous few pages of this web book.

Have a play around...    select a pair of elements from the two drop menus:

↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓
↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓
Sodium:  Eneg = 0.93   Valency = 1 Chlorine:  Eneg = 3.16   Valency = 1
Calculated name: Sodium chloride
Electronegativity difference, Δχ = 2.23   Average Electronegativity, (χa + χb)/2 = 2.045
% Ionic = 71.2    % Covalent = 28.8    Stoichiometric Formula = NaCl

Calculated name: Sodium chloride

From The Chemical Thesaurus Database
Formula
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Sodium chloride

The author holding a physical model of the truncated tetrahedron of structure, bonding & material type. Download, print, cut out & build your own:


Read more about the Binary Material synthlet on the previous two pages of this web book: the van Arkel-Ketelaar Triangle of Bonding and the Tetrahedron of Structure, Bonding & Material Type.

Yes, the synthlet does make mistakes. For example, the well known gas carbon dioxide, CO2, is predicted to be a network covalent material like sand: silicon dioxide, SiO2.

But the model is right more than 90% of the time... and it is the fact that the model does not always predict correctly that makes chemistry so facinating!

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Tetrahedra of Material Type Classification of Matter

© Mark R. Leach 1999 –

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