Another nanostructured building product that’s on the market is a type of steel, known as MMFX 2, developed by MMFX Technologies. Its inventor, University of California, Berkeley, materials science professor Gareth Thomas, first used electron microscopy to peer into steel’s nanostructure in the 1980s. Twenty years later, Thomas led MMFX in developing a series of key patents for making nanostructured steel.

“Making steel was always a black art or a black science,” says MMFX founder and former chief executive officer David C. Pollack. “They used to heat, beat, and hope. They kind of understood what was going on, but with electron microscopy they could actually see what was happening at the nanoscale,” he says. “This gave us a whole new understanding.

“Conventional steel, when it cools, goes through a transformation where it loses its affinity for binding carbon. What happens then is carbon precipitates and that precipitation forms carbides at the grain boundaries,” Pollack explains. “These carbides are very hard, but they’re also very brittle and they’re dissimilar to the rest of the steel microstructure. They’re the Achilles’ heel of the steel.”

In a moist environment, David Pollack continues, the carbides form a microgalvanic cell with the steel’s ferrites, which begins to corrode the steel from within. But MMFX 2 steel is different. It’s made of alternating nanoscale layers of austenite and martensite—two crystal forms of steel—and is virtually carbide-free at the grain boundaries.

Without the carbides at the grain boundaries, the material is ductile, rather than brittle, and resists the corrosion seen in conventional steel. The nanolayered structure also makes the material strong, Pollack says, because it’s composed of both hard and soft layers of material that can bend without breaking.

MMFX 2 steel is made with conventional steel-making equipment. Pollack says that when talking about nanotechnology, people often marvel at materials made by the gram. “In the case of MMFX, we can make nanotechnology at 100 tons an hour,” he says.

The material has been used in buildings, highways, and bridges and has an expected service life of 200 years. And because it’s twice as strong as conventional steel, Pollack notes, structures require less steel to do the same job. So although the steel itself is more expensive than conventional material, labor costs are reduced.