Sunday 22 September 2019

A model of an ionic compound

We made 3D models of a simple ionic compound using jelly babies and spaghetti. The two different colours of jelly baby represent positive and negative ions. The spaghetti represents the electrostatic attraction. If you are tempted to do this, the brittle spaghetti caused quite a mess. This could be NaCl where the charges are the same and the ratio is 1:1. I looked into modelling something like CaCl2 but the pictures I found of the ionic arrangements were hard to make.