Nanotech Makes Steel 10x Stronger

An anonymous reader writes: A new metal-making process currently in testing at oil fields uses nano-scale plating to make metals like steel as much as ten times stronger than they would be without it. "[The process] uses an advanced form of electroplating, a process already used to make the chrome plating you might see on the engine and exhaust pipes of a motorcycle. Electroplating involves immersing a metal part in a chemical bath containing various metal ions, and then applying an electrical current to cause those ions to form a metal coating. The company uses a bath that contains more than one kind of metal ion and controls how ions are deposited by varying the electrical current. By changing the current at precise moments, it can create a layered structure, with each layer being several nanometers thick and of different composition. The final coating can be up to a centimeter thick and can greatly change the properties of the original material."

Comments

Star Trek did it!

[ArcadeMan]

Lt. Barclay: Commander, this is what we're thinking of using to replace the damaged warp plasma conduit.
Lieutenant Commander Geordi La Forge: [examines the unit] Yeah, Reg... yeah, that's good. But you're going to need to reinforce this copper tubing with a nanopolymer.

http://vignette3.wikia.nocooki...

Re:Star Trek did it!

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, a show in the future mentioned a nifty future idea without doing any of the heavy lifting. Who da thunk it!

Re:Star Trek did it!

[LordLimecat]

I think theres a slight difference between "multi-layer" and polymer.

Actually theyre almost antonyms.

Re:Star Trek did it!

[ArcadeMan]

Yeah sure, whatever. Just re-modulate the shields frequency and we're good to go.

Approaching the problem from the outside in.

[BlacKSacrificE]

So instead of trying to make the drinking straw stronger, we are just wrapping it in cement?

It's an interesting concept, but it seems a little "cheaty" to me. We'll see where it goes I guess.

Re:Approaching the problem from the outside in.

[GloomE]

Cheaty like refining iron from ore instead of just using the sharp rocks and strong branches you find laying around?

Re:Approaching the problem from the outside in.

[frup]

If it's 10x stronger and gets the job done, it solves the problem. Next job is for the quantity surveyor to figure out at which point having 2 or even 10 steel beams is more expensive than shelling out for this premium technology (Or to put it another way, figure out when this technology is cost effective.) If it's using less material, it's likely to be more sustainable too. Did you want them to invent a new element? lol.

Re:Approaching the problem from the outside in.

[SeaFox]

So instead of trying to make the drinking straw stronger, we are just wrapping it in cement?

So kinda like spiral-welded pipes (except on the outside)?

Re:Approaching the problem from the outside in.

[FatdogHaiku]

If using less materials would be considered "green", then doing so by electroplating would be considered "red"... as in, rhymes with dead... getting rid of heavy metals, nasty solvents, and cyanide can also drive up costs.
http://www.epa.gov/oaqps001/community/details/electroplating_addl_info.html

Re:Approaching the problem from the outside in.

[TheLink]

I think the next job would be to see what happens when it starts rusting a bit or gets scratched/nicked or gets heated up or temperature cycled. See how much of the strength is lost.

I wouldn't rely on the material for important stuff till I knew how the material can fail and how well it fails.

Re:Approaching the problem from the outside in.

[nospam007]

"So instead of trying to make the drinking straw stronger, we are just wrapping it in cement?"

Exactly my thoughts. 1cm is a bit much, so why not remove the steel (straw) afterwards and use only the remaining strong stuff?

Re:Approaching the problem from the outside in.

[Anonymous Coward]

Those issues are not inherent in electroplating, only when electroplating using specific methods or for specific purposes. Of course you are going to have chromium waste if you are electroplating with chromium. But if you're not using chromium or alloys with chromium in it, you won't suddenly end up with chromium waste. It really depends on what process and metals they are using for this.

Re:Approaching the problem from the outside in.

[Anonymous Coward]

Presumably you would start with a thinner piece of metal. If you reduce your 8cm diameter piece of metal to 2cm core +1cm thick coating and it's still the same structural properties, that's a net 4cm reduction in diameter on your structural piece.

Also i doubt all application use a 1cm coating. That was the maximum the method can achieve not the minimum needed for a useful result.

Ob SF.

[Anonymous Coward]

A. E. Van Vogt's classic SF novel "Slan" had a major plot point centering on "10 point steel". Perhaps we've finally implemented his vision...

Ten times stronger?

[Okian Warrior]

I've been rummaging around their website, and can only find references to corrosion resistance. That a specially-plated metal is more corrosion resistant I can easily believe.

But 10x stronger? That seems a bit... hard to believe.

Does plating a piece of steel really multiply the yield strength by 10x? Any materials scientists want to comment on this?

Also, how does a 1cm coating fare during changes in temperature? Will the coating peel off due to thermal expansion/contraction of the underlying metal?

I couldn't find any supporting scientific studies.

Is this for real?

Re:Ten times stronger?

[shione]

I was gonna post the same thing. The article is pretty devoid of details and mentions nothing about tensile and compressive strength.

All it pretty much says is improved corrosion resistance and this short paragraph:

"David Lashmore, a professor of materials science at the University of New Hampshire who has conducted work in the area, says nano-engineered layers can make a material stronger by stopping cracks from moving through it."

So it sounds like it 'holds' the metal together from micro fractures but it says nothing about taking on the applied forces which would make it actually stronger.

Re:Ten times stronger?

[Bugler412]

not directly changing the strength perhaps, but what if extreme corrosion resistance allowed you to reduce margins on structural members of bridges for instance (appropriately tested and vetted of course please!) or changed the durability of steel rebar in concrete? Reduced assumptions of corrosion loss over the years, that can be very significant and give an effective real world increase in the strength you are able to assume.

Re:Ten times stronger?

[Bugler412]

if anywhere near practical economically

Re:Ten times stronger?

[burtosis]

We already have steels approaching 10x stronger than mild steel, I'm not sure what they are even trying to say. The complete lack of any details, along with fantastic nebulous claims smacks of bs. Perhaps it's like another poster said, it improves tensile load bearing in corrosive enviornments which can seriously weaken parts and make them susceptible to fatigue.

Re:Ten times stronger?

[Dutch Gun]

Nearly anything becomes economical if you can automate it and scale it up large enough. We'll have to see how the testing process goes first, I'd think. Civil engineering is a pretty conservative field, for very good reasons. At the scale we're making things nowadays, you need to be really, really certain about the properties of your building materials, and how it will hold up for the next fifty years under stress. I'd imagine they'll go through many years of testing and deploying in relatively small scales to prove it's worth, then start working their way up as everyone grows more confident of it's long-term viability.

Re:Ten times stronger?

[Harlequin80]

There are already options in concrete reinforcing that are significantly more corrosion resistant than standard rebar that are not used because they are more expensive at the initial phase. For example using stainless steel rebar in a port or seawall structure is done and easily available. However I know of many projects where it is not used because the initial cost is higher. This is despite it being only 20 years before stainless moves into the lead on cost due to significantly lower maintenance and the fact you don't have to run a current through it to try and stop it corroding.

Re:Ten times stronger?

[Anonymous Coward]

Does plating a piece of steel really multiply the yield strength by 10x? Any materials scientists want to comment on this? Well it depends on exactly how they layer on their other layers. Normally steel has a certain standard crystalline structure (cast steel and it always arranges itself in this way). But just look at carbon that is arranged in different structures. Carbon arranged in a 2d structure makes a material called graphite: the softest mineral known. Carbon arranged in a 3d structure is called diamond: the hardest mineral known. Lets look at another modified chemical structure: cement. Now recall that cement with sand and gravel becomes concrete, but the binder is the cement. In modern building, Portland cement is the standard. It bonds, but galling (flaking) begins to occur after a few years. If you build a seawall from it, it lasts maybe 15-20 years. If you are lucky, 30 years. Compare and contrast Roman cement. Seawalls built by the Romans (with Roman cement) poured 3000 years ago are still standing and look like they were poured yesterday. No galling (no chipping or flaking). Just about 1 year ago, it was found that the Romans used a type of fly ash with a high aluminum ore content, that when made into cement forms a stronger 3 dimensional bond. Plating a 3 dimensional strength layer on steel could be like diamond.

Re:Ten times stronger?

[Anonymous Coward]

Clearly they mean the same kind of strength as you see in all those scientifically proven hair products :).

Re:Ten times stronger?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi,

a PhD in material science from 2001 (but that's very rusty by now).
If we're talking about tensile strength and non-exotic materials (i.e. not graphene[1]), the strength is
predominantly determined by the bulk properties of a material. E.g., in a metal, it's the electronic
band structure (a nearly free electron gas). This is changed very little with a traditional coating,
which only affetcs the outermost atomic layers of the material. There just isn't enough material
at the surface of have an impact on the whole slab.

However, if you make a thick coating (cm-scale, like cited in the article summary), and you by that
achieve greater tensile strength, this is likely a property of the coating, and not the coated material.

I have not actually read the article but the summary is probably misleading, maybe tweaked to sound
more interesting than it is.

[1] When it come to graphene, that has "magic" properties. Estimates show that it has tensile
strength of about 100 000 MPa, but I'm puzzled what that means. Graphene does not exist in
pure form (from what I know); only as few atomic layers on top of some other material. If you
stack lots of graphene sheets together for form a material if its own, this is graphite (from what
I can tell...), which does not exhibit unusual properties at all (55 MPa). It comes back to: what
is it that you actually measure?

Re:Ten times stronger?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Isn't the whole family of alloys we call 'steel' essentially a testament to the fact that certain nanoscale structures(that, conveniently for us, can be produced by comparatively primitive methods) in iron can radically improve its properties compared the the (actually pretty lousy) pure metal?

Re:Ten times stronger?

[blackest_k]

Actually it does make sense small cracks do concentrate stresses at the head of the V which break through the crystal structure a layer at a time.

As a simple demo get a piece of paper and pull on it, you will find it pretty hard to tear it , now just nick the edge of the paper and try again, you should find it yields quite easily.

The tensile strength of steel would be a lot higher if it wasn't full of imperfections. incidentally there are two crystal structures you get with steel face centered cubic and body centered cubic

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...

now the interesting thing about this is that when you cool down steel rapidly you get one form and slowly you get the other form so if your quenching something more than a foot thick you get both types of crystals since heat just isn't removed fast enough from the centre. the larger crystal structure is in the centre and the smaller crystal structure is on the outside. This means the inside is trying to be bigger than the outside. so the outer surfaces are massively stressed. like a bomb stressed seriously. You can't cut through steel stressed like this with a saw as the cutting would unbalance the stresses and it would blow apart, so you have to do something called plunge grinding which is done in a massive lathe with a grinding wheel taking it down equally on all sides.

This is what happens when you produce a roll for a cold rolling mill the outside is very hard with a softer core. Usually the forces are lower than the uts of the steel but sometimes it isn't and you get catastrophic failures. generally this happens in the quenching tank where its safe you normally hear a few bangs as lumps of steel spawl off from the outside followed by a boom as the roll breaks apart and goes crashing down to the bottom of the tank.

Rarely they fail after the heat treatment, joe the hardness tester where i used to work was nearly killed by one. he'd hardness tested it around 12pm (the hardness was abnormally high around 890 vickers) an hour later it blew apart a ton and a half of journal end was launched across the factory floor missing his legs by inches. he was off work for a week after with the shock. We also had a used roll blow up in a storage warehouse one weekend and it took a wall out, this had been in service and had been worn down to below a serviceable size. Even after all that time it was still stressed ...

back on topic , it seems reasonable that by removing the sites for cracks to occur the uts of the steel will be much higher, normally the way round the problem is to make the thing bigger that way the forces applied will not break the cross section of course that makes it heavier and harder to work with which is why its a specialized area like drilling where this has been applied, with the plating thicknesses used the cost will be way higher than for the regular steel pipes, i'd expect probably more than 10x the cost but the rig would be able to drill deeper and that's what matters, and the return on that makes the drilling costs look like peanuts.

Re:Ten times stronger?

[loufoque]

Aren't the nanoscale structures of carbon more interesting?
Carbon seems to be stronger and lighter than iron. Why do we even mix the two together?

Re:Ten times stronger?

[burtosis]

Absolutely not! Only fancy expensive materials have small scale structure. Why the very famous buysumberg principle alone states if you try to look and see without paying its indeterminate, simple introductory business laws at work.

seriously though, http://en.m.wikibooks.org/wiki... if you had a 'perfect' crystal of metal, such as is common microscopically, the strength of pure metals is around 1000x that of actual samples due to defects. Basically defects pre-stretch the bonds removing most of the needed energy needed to make them slip. Controlling how the defects occur through easy to apply processes is exactly how its possible to easily change the properties.

Re:Ten times stronger?

[cdrudge]

That's the awesome thing about saying something is stronger. Without qualifying that as what type of "strong" they are talking about, it can be anything! Tensile strength? Yield strength? Sheer strength? Ductility? Wear resistance? Corrosion resistance? It's all covered!

Re:Ten times stronger?

[trout007]

Yielding is a statistical process. If the layers are actually isolated then I guess you could have failure in one layer that doesn't propagate to the next. Similar to first ply failure with composites. Theoretically perfect metals are much stronger than what we can make because of these failures. So maybe that is what they are claiming? By producing metal this way you will have less flaws and those that exist will only fail locally and not cause failure across the specimen?

Re:Ten times stronger?

[orgelspieler]

As a corrosion coatings engineer, I can tell you that this already happens. It's the whole reason I have a job. You see those green pipes going down the road on a flatbed truck? That's fusion bonded epoxy (powder coating) on plain jane steel pipes. There are several places that FBE coat their rebar before putting it in concrete structures, like you suggested. Combine a good corrosion coating with some healthy cathodic protection, and you can tremendously increase the lifespan of your infrastructure.

However, there are a lot of snake oil salesmen that try to claim "nano" coatings, when really their just dipping the steel in silane or electroplating it or any number of things that look fancy. They probably do help corrosion, but they are no more "nano" than bailing wire and bubble gum. Unfortunately for them, I'm friends with a PhD in advanced material sciences, and it's pretty easy for her to sift through the BS.

Re:Ten times stronger?

[muffbagmuffbagmuffba]

you have to do something called plunge grinding

Plunge grinding was only legalised in the UK in 1952, and those prosecuted were all posthumously pardoned by the then prime minister, Gordon Brown, in 2007.

Re:Ten times stronger?

[blackest_k]

must mean something different outside of yorkshire

NANO Tech ?

[Crashmarik]

We used to call this physical chemistry. I suppose that doesn't sound as sexy.

Re:NANO Tech ?

[E-Rock]

Marketing has infected the world. Why just describe what you're doing when you can toss out a few buzzwords and get a lot more attention?

Re:NANO Tech ?

[Buchenskjoll]

OK, we'll call it ionforged, then.

Re:NANO Tech ?

[Crashmarik]

Nope Blacksmiths were early NANO TECH engineers.

Look at their control of Pearlite and Bainite microstructures.

Potential problem

[Mal-2]

Having done electroplating myself, though only on a small scale, I have noticed that sometimes applying an excessively high voltage doesn't make the solute metal ions stop attaching, it just makes them bring along some "scum" along with them. Most notably, throwing too much voltage at silver solution produces a black scum which must be cleaned off before anything else (including more silver) will stick. I have to imagine other metals have the same problem.

If one ion truly prefers a given voltage and sticks to the surface preferentially, this might block other ions that want to form the "scum", but I still think this would significantly limit the number and type of ions they can have in any given solution.

It also seems that the technology to do this is simpler than they are billing it -- pull the parts and dip them in each bath as needed. Rinse in between. We have robots to do this now, it's not like someone has to stand there and watch.

Re: Potential problem

[Mal-2]

Maybe TFA is bad at conveying what they're doing then, because the impression I got from it was "we have a way to electroplate multiple metals selectively by adjusting the voltage. Doing this enough times can make the bulk material much stronger." If laying down a plating layer nanometers thick is now "manipulating materials on a molecular level", then I can do that in my kitchen with less than $100 in equipment. I believe the thickness of the plating I typically lay down in a single pass is on the scale of four or five atoms, but I make hundreds of small passes, stop, clean, and make hundreds more. If I tank plate rather than brush plate, I don't have as much control, but it could still be done if I had an assistant (robot) to move the parts around for me.

Even if I grant both possibilities in full, how does this make them integral to each other? They could electroplate thousands of thin layers before, it just required moving parts between vats. This is obviously impractical from a human labor perspective, but it may not be substantial at all with machine labor, so it seems they have reduced a cost. They haven't solved a fundamental problem. Would you care to explain, with citations from TFA, how exactly I am clueless?

I know perfectly well how the metal ions deplete from the solution, changing the voltage and time required to get an effective coat. Once they drop below a certain level, it just stops working and throwing more power at it doesn't help. The mixture of solutes would have to be carefully monitored and controlled to prevent this from becoming an issue, at which point it seems simpler to me to use one bath per metal. You can recharge the solutions on a pretty regular basis that way, and not have to do much monitoring at all. You can step up voltage (to a point) to accommodate a weaker solution, without fearing that you're going to attract a different metal. Possibly most important for economy of scale, you can more easily recover the residuals of the spent solution for reprocessing if they haven't all been mixed together.

Where's the beef?

[Anonymous Coward]

No details of achieved strengths - some maraging steels already Achieve >2GPa strength, and steel wires up to 5GPa, existing steel metallurgy already has methods for creating laminated structures and other high strength nanocomposites (eg look at bainite, pearlite, and other common steel morphologies with microscopic segregated grains of differing composition within the metal structure caused by methods of cooling). Bet anything these are at best only in about the 1-2GPa range - if they were genuinely better they would publish the numbers.

Electrochemical deposition is an incredibly expensive fabrication method, and yet the press release talks of using it in bridges? Some high strength (>1GPa) steels can be manufactured for around $1/kg. Without more concrete data these guys are touting snake oil.

Sure

[fisted]

with each layer being several nanometers thick and of different composition. The final coating can be up to a centimeter thick

That's quite some layers...

Ten Times More Expensive?

[The_Dougster]

That process, as described, sounds incredibly expensive. I suppose though, if you get the strength of titanium, this might be more economical than using the real thing for large parts. I'm sure that dealing with the waste stream is a major issue, not to mention the energy consumption.

"Up to" 10 x stronger

[Tony Isaac]

That sounds like marketing-speak to me. The "up to" part means it could be 0 x stronger, or 1.1 x stronger, and theoretically (but not likely ever in real life) up to 10 x stronger.

Nanotech?

[Tony Isaac]

I guess now we call everything "nanotech," such as what we used to call "electro-plating."

Re: Nanotech?

[oobayly]

There's a difference?

Re:Tank Armor

[cb88]

Eh... I want to read the sequels to Count to a Trillion. Its a pretty far out there SciFi but it read quickly and kept me interested.

One of my favorite SciFi novels is The Excalibur Alternative which happens to be a free baen ebook... I want a sequel to that so bad.

Ender's game was pretty entertaining as well but I don't really have any desire to read the shadow series of it.... since it occurs chronologically at the same time as the rest of the stories I just feel it is rather pointless though I could be wrong.

Well, I hope you recover from nonfinishitis soon.. and whatever you do do not read the Hot Zone (This is the one that triggered ny nonfinishitis).

Katana

[frankenpc510]

Imagine the next generation of sword steel. Or heck, pocket knife blades. How about razor blades? Will disposable blades become obsolete? I wonder how flexible the material is. Brittleness? Ductility?

modumetal is the developer of the process

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.modumetal.com/

maybe their site has a little more information?

corrosion !

[jojoslashdot]

I work in the corrosion field and its plausible that the corrosion rate would lower using a surface treatment. But what does stronger for you mean ??? Pls have a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M... stronger is too generic..

Nano -forming- ?

[ThePromenader]

Well, it's a start. I'm waiting for the technology that allows us to 'pour' metal into 'nanoforms' - say, interlocking wire pyramids - which would allow for stronger, lighter, less-resource-consuming, and -flexible- forms.

*shrug*

[X10]

This was invented long ago, and it's called "Rearden metal".

Re:*shrug*

[Demonoid-Penguin]

This was invented long ago, and it's called "Rearden metal".

Invented? Yes (by Ayn Rand the fiction writer).
News Flash! Santa Claus and Superman don't exist either (sob)

Exists? Well, it is made from Unobtainium - the pure bullshit element. You guess.

Bainite Steel - different technology used to create a pearlite/martensite mixture that's 7% harder.

It's not chrome

[darthsilun]

A bit off topic, but––

a process already used to make the chrome plating you might see on the engine and exhaust pipes of a motorcycle.

The exhaust pipes are nickel plated to give it the the shiny-shiny everyone likes. Chrome plating is transparent (think of it as a metallic clear coat) and is used to keep the nickel from oxidizing. Most aluminum motorcycle engines aren't plated, just highly polished. Note that I said most; no doubt some wag will jump in to claim I'm wrong and that a lot of bikes do have chromed [sic] engines.

The same is true for all that "chrome" on cars through the seventies – bumpers, door handles, all the other various shiny bits and pieces – it's nickel plated. (Or often it's polished stainless steel, or aluminized steel.)

Cars

[justthinkit]

Less is more in automotive design. High strength steels of the past ten years have brought better gas mileage without compromise. I'm sure this will make things one stage better.

Re:Cars

[stoatwblr]

"High strength steels of the past ten years have brought better gas mileage without compromise"

Cars are _still_ significantly heavier than they were 15-16 years ago. It seems that every time a new method make the vehicle stronger with the same mass, they keep the mass and add strength.

Cracks

[ThatsNotPudding]

The one problem with industrial hard chrome plating (not the pretty, shiny, ornamental chrome in the summary which is rather useless) is that it has micro cracks that are inherent to the plating process. So unless you put a un-cracked corrosion-proof substrate (such as electroless nickel) on first, there will be plenty of paths thru the chrome cracks to begin corroding the base metal. Given the common presence of sour gas (high free hydrogen content), the oil patch long ago switched to non-carbon steels and plating to alloys, stainless, and flame-sprayed metal coatings (nickel, columbium, etc.) that do not feature microcracks (aka Polished Rod).

things for catastrophic failure in metal...

[Kaitiff]

You need a pre-existing flaw for there to be a catastrophic failure in a metal. One of the reasons modern steel is so much stronger than steel made 100's of years ago (in general) is that we have learned to control the cooling of the metals to create more uniform crystal formation, and to fill interstitial defects with other elements, like carbon. We had to study metallurgy some when I was in the nuclear power program in the navy and you'll have to forgive me, I"m 30 years out from learning this stuff but it would seem to me that if you could 'fill in' or create layers in the steel it would be far less likely to fail. I would imagine the '10x' statement is somewhat hyperbolic and doesn't mean you could replace a structural beam with something the size of a soda straw, it probably means that when they perform a charpy V-notch test on the metal substrate it can withstand 10X stress in one direction compared to the untreated metal. Regardless, very interesting piece.

Will it be called Rearden metal?

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

Sounds like this metal is to steel what steel is to iron. I vaguely recall a name for this material. Quick, someone make a bracelet out of this!

Stronger? Don't need it. Give me stiffer!

[Overzeetop]

Except in specialized cases for manfacturing and mining, we have all the strength we need in buildings and bridges. What we really want is something with a higher stiffness.

Find me a material which costs the same as A992 steel and has a modulus of elasticity of 300x10^6 psi (10x that of steel) and I'll make you a millionaire. With very few exceptions, MOE scales linearly with mass, from Magnesium to Iridium. Beryllium-Aluminum is an exception, but is very brittle and hella expensive.

Yeah, get me 500ksi steel at $0.60/lb would be nice, but if it still has E=30E3ksi it won't save me much in a building. Give me 50ksi steel with E=300E3ksi and I'll save you at least 20% on the steel tonnage in a structure.

I've heard of this

[slashmydots]

In Starcraft 2 it also increases the capacity of your Terran bunkers by 2 if you research it.

Is this layering comparable to Japanese sword maki

[Gefion]

Just wondering how "folding" into layers (which clearly makes the sword stronger/more resilient) compares to this proposed electrolysis layering?

Need more to burn more oil!!

[MrL0G1C]

The new technology could make those parts last much longer and thus lower the cost of pursuing unconventional sources of oil.

Because what the world needs is to get every last drop of oil out of the ground and burn it. Global warming, what global warming?

Promethus meh'd.

[Thud457]

Just imagine what this will do for the manufacture of railroad tracks. This revolutionary breakthrough will truly lead to a 21st century of peace and prosperity for all.

Also, I'd be more impressed if they were growing nano-scale Damascus steel blades with Buckytube inclusions.

Re:Is this layering comparable to Japanese sword m

[q4Fry]

I also came here to say this. It sounds (and IANA materials scientist nor an antique arms enthusiast) like they are achieving a similar effect albeit with a much higher precision.

Plausable

[cwsumner]

It is possible that it could make steel much stronger, by preventing microcracks from starting at the surface. Cracks start at defects in the metal or in uneven surface features like micro-scratches. If a coating can smooth and reinforce the surface, then it can stave off cracks starting and push the breaking point to much higher levels.

We already have methods of preventing defects inside the metal, and I assume they are already using those methods.

We also have used surface hardening to strengthen metals and other things (see Corel dishes). So if the coating is stronger we know it will help.