The Bond Valence Model as a Tool for Teaching Inorganic Chemistry: The Ionic Model Revisited

The ionic model is shown to give a good description of most inorganic materials, such as salts, ceramics, and minerals, regardless of the covalent or ionic character of their bonds. The virtue of the model is its ability to treat chemical bonding using simple electrostatic theory, all the quantum mechanical effects being contained in a short-range potential that is treated empirically. By exploiting the properties of the electrostatic field, a …