When you look at an image of an iron alloy, sometimes it looks like a lot of little bricks, keys on your keyboard, or big town center octagonal tiles mushed together.
The internet says you can mold metal into shapes that are 40 nanometers, much less than the size of the little tiles.
What if you
stirred into the alloy # tessellation some between-tile gripping octopuses? You can imagine gripping and being near just tiles of 7 span, and repeating the octopus motif would generate different grippiness than say, one octopus with 300 tile span long arms making loose loops and shapes like tile Brassieres.
Well iron grains are the tiles, and the octopuses are made of things like pure Tungsten, Vanadium, and Chromium. When the Fe is liquid you just stir in the octopuses.
Do the octopuses make the sheets of metal twice as rigid? Perhaps they compress differently? What if an iconoclast says Octopus' are passe and you will get greater rigidity from making those undulating egg-crate looking produce aisle papers and putting them on say, 1-40% of the tiled surface to cause different organizational tendencies?
Additives that provide superstructure to alloy grains seem likely to give metals new capabilities. After they did some experiments they could make computer models.
Are Octopuses. pure metal brassieres for alloy grains, cheap?
I think octopuses are about double their raw pure metal price. The smallest molds I saw on the internet are just 40 nanometers big for casting things. Iron grains are much larger than that. If you electroplate into the mold with a metal chloride solution, say something like zapping WCl with electricity, and then you can successfully release the mold and reuse it.
Superstructure-on-grain support shapes; "metal grain Bras" ω if they are only twice as much as the raw metal could make any fancy alloy that is say 22% tungsten work as well or better and be 11% tungsten.
I'm really interested to find out if Ni and Cr metal grain bras can do corrosion resistance at much lower material cost. Stronger looks fairly straightforward, but corrosion is elecrochemical and I do not think stainless steel that is 1/3-1/2 the cost will come out of this.
If it works it's kind of exciting: most fancy alloys at 1/2 to 1/3 usual cost. New supersupport alloys with completely different strength and flex characteristics.
This is all a little less expensive than it sounds. They have to put up with using these and other alloying bra metals anyway.