The pentagonal bifrustum or truncated pentagonal

bipyramid A (symmetric) -gonal bipyramid or dipyramid is a polyhedron formed by joining an -gonal pyramid and its mirror image base-to-base. An -gonal bipyramid has triangle faces, edges, and vertices. The "-gonal" in the name of a bipyramid does ...

is the third in an infinite series of

bifrustum An ''n''-agonal bifrustum is a polyhedron composed of three parallel planes of ''n''-agons, with the middle plane largest and usually the top and bottom congruent. It can be constructed as two congruent frusta combined across a plane of symmetry ...

polyhedra. It has 10

trapezoid A quadrilateral with at least one pair of parallel sides is called a trapezoid () in American and Canadian English. In British and other forms of English, it is called a trapezium (). A trapezoid is necessarily a convex quadrilateral in Eucli ...

and 2

pentagon In geometry, a pentagon (from the Greek language, Greek πέντε ''pente'' meaning ''five'' and γωνία ''gonia'' meaning ''angle'') is any five-sided polygon or 5-gon. The sum of the internal angles in a simple polygon, simple pentagon is ...

al faces.

Constructions

The pentagonal bifrustum is the

dual polyhedron In geometry, every polyhedron is associated with a second dual structure, where the vertices of one correspond to the faces of the other, and the edges between pairs of vertices of one correspond to the edges between pairs of faces of the othe ...

of a

Johnson solid In geometry, a Johnson solid is a strictly convex polyhedron each face of which is a regular polygon. There is no requirement that each face must be the same polygon, or that the same polygons join around each vertex. An example of a Johns ...

, the elongated pentagonal bipyramid. This polyhedron can be constructed by taking a

pentagonal bipyramid In geometry, the pentagonal bipyramid (or dipyramid) is third of the infinite set of face-transitive bipyramids, and the 13th Johnson solid (). Each bipyramid is the dual of a uniform prism. Although it is face-transitive, it is not a Platoni ...

and truncating the polar axis vertices. In Conway's notation for polyhedra, it can be represented as the polyhedron "t5dP5", meaning the truncation of the degree-five vertices of the dual of a

pentagonal prism In geometry, the pentagonal prism is a prism with a pentagonal base. It is a type of heptahedron with seven faces, fifteen edges, and ten vertices. As a semiregular (or uniform) polyhedron If faces are all regular, the pentagonal prism is a ...

. Alternatively, it can be constructed by gluing together two end-to-end pentagonal

frustum In geometry, a (from the Latin for "morsel"; plural: ''frusta'' or ''frustums'') is the portion of a solid (normally a pyramid or a cone) that lies between two parallel planes cutting this solid. In the case of a pyramid, the base faces are ...

s, or (if coplanar faces are allowed) by gluing together two pentagonal prisms on their pentagonal faces.

Application

In the formation of

quasicrystal A quasiperiodic crystal, or quasicrystal, is a structure that is ordered but not periodic. A quasicrystalline pattern can continuously fill all available space, but it lacks translational symmetry. While crystals, according to the classical ...

s, a 15-site truncated pentagonal bipyramid structure may form the

nucleus Nucleus ( : nuclei) is a Latin word for the seed inside a fruit. It most often refers to: *Atomic nucleus, the very dense central region of an atom * Cell nucleus, a central organelle of a eukaryotic cell, containing most of the cell's DNA Nucl ...

of larger structures with five-fold or icosahedral symmetry..

References

{{reflist Polyhedra