Buckyballs – Molecular Models by pmoews
Now that the days are growing shorter and the wind grows chilly, it’s normal for a young man’s thoughts to turn to…buckyballs. And now, thanks to the dedicated work of pmoews, we have not only some lovely, printable .stls but also some lovely, parametric OpenSCAD models to generate as many different fullerenes as you could possibly imagine!
So, as the seasons change, you can start off your week printing the Dymaxion molecule!
Here's a simple molecular modeling program written in OPENscad. It's a derivative of the OPENscad program in "Protein Models". It contains two modules, "atom" and "bond". A call to atom makes a sphere and a call to bond makes a cylinder. Atom requires a radius and a set of atomic coordinates; bond requires two sets of atomic coordinates. For example to make a water molecule we could write:
atom (.3, 0, 0, 0); // an Oxygen at the origin, .3 for its radius
atom (.25, -.96, 0, 0); // for the first H atom, .25 for its radius
atom (.25, .24, .93, 0); // for the second H atom
bond (0,0,0,-.96,0,0); // for the first O-H bond
bond (0,0,0,.24,.93.0); // for the second o-H bond
To render it all together the above commands are included within a union statement. More details in makewater.scad.
Once I had this program I began looking for coordinates of interesting molecules to print. I found a collection of fullerenes at ccl.net/cca/data/fullerenes/index.shtml Better known as "Buckyballs" you can read about the fullerenes on Wikipedia. The buckyball most discussed contains 60 carbon atoms but the coordinate collection has a range of sizes, from 20 to 540 atms.
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| Tagged with | buckminster fuller, chemistry, openscad | One comment |
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