obeys the conditions for the ionic model with carbon as the cation and hydrogen as the anion (or vice versa, since carbon and hydrogen have the same electronegativity). For compounds that contain cation-cation or anion-anion bonds it is usually possible to transform these homoionic bonds into cation-anion bonds either by treating the atoms linked by the homoionic bond as a single complex cation (e.g., Hg22+), or by treating the bonding electrons in the homoionic bond as a pseudo-anion to transform a cation-cation bond into two cation - pseudo-anion bonds, e.g., Hg2+-e2−-Hg2+. The covalent model Structures containing covalent bonds can be treated using the ionic model providing they satisfy the topological conditions given above, but a special situation applies to hydrocarbons which allows the bond valence model to be reduced to the traditional bond model of organic chemistry. If an atom has a valence, V, that is equal to its coordination number, N, its bonding strength according to Eq. 3 is exactly 1.0 vu (valence units), a condition that greatly simplifies the model. This condition is obeyed by carbon, hydrogen and silicon. Since these atoms all have bonding strengths of 1.0 vu the bonds between them are all predicted to have integral valences with carbon forming four single bonds and hydrogen one. Under these conditions, the bonds are all single bonds (or multiples of single bonds). Compounds can be constructed by linking carbon and hydrogen atoms with bonds that are all exactly equivalent. Under certain conditions, nitrogen can form three bonds and oxygen two, but since nitrogen and oxygen typically also form hydrogen bonds, the resulting N-H and O-H bonds have valences less than 1.0 vu, leading through the application of Eq. 1, to the C-C and C-H bonds having valences that differ from 1.0 vu. Nevertheless, the simple bonding rules of organic chemistry are still good approximations, though the rules of the bond valence model are better. Predicting bonding geometry A chemical structure can be represented by a bond network of the kind familiar in molecular diagrams. The infinitely connected bond networks found in crystals can be simplified into finite networks by extracting one formula unit and reconnecting any broken bonds to each other. If the bond network is not known, a plausible network can be created by connecting well matched cations and anions that satisfy Eq. 4. If the finite network contains only cation-anion bonds, every bond can be