With this post comes the new category RhinoDesign. Rhino is a 3d modeling tool. I have been using it for almost 2 years, and find it very very powerful and yet at the same time easy to use. With its Grasshopper plugging, which is officially called Explicit History, it can even handle vector operations like cross-product and inner products. Combined with its unusual graphical interface and its capacity to program like any other computer programming language, it creates the new design methodology called parametric design. More to read at its official website.
My first grasshopper design is about a material I am working on in my PhD program, called periodic mesoporous organosilica. Its most common structure is hexagonally packed pores, resembling a honey comb, except its pore size is around 2-10 nm. Remind you, 1 nm is one billionth of 1 meter. Since its pore size is so small, it diffracts X-ray. And its diffraction pattern can be easily visualized using the theory of reciprocal space.
This version has finished the vector construction, including the unit vectors in both real space and reciprocal space. The next step would be to completes the reciprocal lattice points by addition and subtraction of unit vectors, and construct Ewald sphere. Then coloring, rendering.
