Hexagonal Closed Packed

HCP metals are usually brittle. Zinc is HCP and is difficult to bend without breaking, unlike copper.
Hexagonal Close Packed Structure
The hexagonal structure is shown in fig. lc. A close packed plane at the bottom and top
of the unit cell is separated by 3 atoms in the cell center, which are also part of a closed packed
plane. Closed packed planes are of the {001} family of which there is only 1 equivalent
HCP (stacking faults)
HCP structures have closed packed planes. If the first layer at the bottom of the unit cell
is the A position, the second layer of three atoms in the center of the unit cell has a choice of B or
C. It chooses B. The third layer, ie the top plane of the unit cell, can choose A or C, but chooses
A. So HCP has a stacking sequence of AB AB AB
HCP(coordination number)
HCP is a closed-packed structure and therefore, by the same argument as that used for
FCC, it has a coordination number of 12 (provided the c/a ratio shown in fig. lc is 1.633.
A c/a = 1.633 is required for perfect packing of spheres. Magnesium is nearest to the perfect
number with 1.62 c/a ratio.

3.6.1 The FCC and HCP structures

Almost all of the elemental solids and alloys that are important in engineering
have one of four crystal structures: face-centered cubic (FCC), hexagonal close-packed
(HCP), body-centered cubic (BCC) and diamond cubic (DC). It is useful to begin with
the FCC and HCP structures since, despite the obvious difference between their unit
cells, they are very closely related to one another. They are the two close-packed
structures that represent the two different ways in which identical, spherical atoms can be
packed together as tightly as possible

The unit cell of the HCP structure is a hexagonal prism with atoms at its corners
and atoms at the centers of its upper and lower faces. There are also three atoms in a
triangular configuration in a plane at half the height of the unit cell; each of these atoms
is located directly above the center of an equilateral triangle of atoms in the basal plane,
as shown in the figure. Since each of the corner atoms in the hexagon is shared by six
adjacent cells and each of the face atoms is shared by two cells, the total number of atoms
per unit cell in the hexagonal close-packed structure is 6.
The HCP lattice is inherently non-primitive. The unit cell of the hexagonal
Bravais lattice is indicated by the heavy lines in Fig. 3.23. There are two atoms per
lattice point of the Bravais lattice. The basis vector of the HCP lattice is indicated by the
dark arrow in Fig. 3.23.
3.6.2 Close-packing in FCC and HCP
While the FCC and HCP cells look quite different as they are drawn in Fig. 3.23,
the two structures have an important physical similarity. The FCC and HCP structures
are the two alternate ways of packing spheres of identical size as densely as possible. For
this reason they are called the close-packed structures.
To see this, recognize that if spheres of the same size are packed in a planar array
as tightly as possible they adopt the hexagonal pattern shown in Fig. 3.24. The pattern is
drawn twice in Fig. 3.24. In the first drawing we show only the spheres, but in the
second the centers of the spheres are labeled with the symbol A, and the interstices
between the spheres are labeled alternately with the symbols B and C.
B
C
A
AA
AA

AA
B
B
CC
(a) (b)
Fig. 3.24: The hexagonal configuration of spheres packed as tightly as
possible into a plane. The spheres and interstices are labeled
in the re-drawn figure (b).
Now let a second layer of spheres be placed on top of the first, or A-layer. These
spheres will naturally sit on the interstices of the A-layer, that is, on the sites labeled B or
C in Fig. 3.24b. But the B and C-sites cannot both be filled in the second layer of a
close-packed elemental solid. As shown in Fig. 3.25, if a sphere occupies a site of type B
then its size prevents spheres from appearing on adjacent sites of type C. Hence only the
B or C-sites are filled in the second layer. Assume the B-sites are filled, as in Fig. 3.25.
Since the choice of which sites are B-type and which C-type is completely arbitrary, the
two methods of stacking identical spheres in two close-packed layers, AB and AC, are
indistinguishable