Wings Of ... Steel?

Feb. 18, 2015
Not only may steel’s retreat from cars be reversed, but a steel aircraft may one day take to the skies.

A LOT of tosh is talked about “nanotechnology”, much of it designed to separate unwary investors from their hard-earned cash. This does not mean, though, that controlling the structure of things at the level of nanometres (billionths of a metre) is unimportant. In materials science it is vital, as a paper just published in Nature, by Hansoo Kim and his colleagues at the Pohang University of Science and Technology, in South Korea, demonstrates. By manipulating the structure of steel on a nanometre scale, Dr Kim has produced a material which has the strength and the lightness of titanium alloys but will, when produced at scale, cost a tenth as much.

Steel is useful because it is strong and cheap. But it is also heavy. It has, therefore, always been useless for applications such as aircraft. 

There is, of course, many a slip ’twixt laboratory bench and production line, but POSCO, one of the world’s largest steel companies, is sufficiently interested in Dr Kim’s discovery to be planning, later this year, a trial that will produce it at industrial scale. If that goes well, not only may steel’s retreat from cars be reversed, but a steel aircraft may one day take to the skies.

More details here.