Corrosion of military aircraft and vehicles is a multi-billion dollar problem for the Pentagon. But a local technology company says they’ve figured out a way to overcome it using nanotechnology—and now Lockheed Martin has partnered with them to develop and use the coating on the aircraft it makes for the military.

“Aircraft that fly in and around coastal communities—in particular, places like Hawaii and Guam—struggle with corrosion,” said Patrick Sullivan, CEO of Oceanit. “It’s an interesting problem because you don’t want to change what they do and how they do it. But if there’s a way to treat the material, and it’s got to be done in a way that’s scalable…so we came up with a process to treat material that’s highly scalable and environmentally looks really good.”

Sullivan said Oceanit tested the super-thin water-based treatment on an air conditioning system at their Honolulu office, which would typically corrode very quickly in the salty ocean breeze. “First we treated the aluminum, because the aluminum goes really fast, and the aluminum outlasted the chassis—by years,” he said.

The company made some tweaks to what they call AeroPel and eventually worked with several commercial airlines before signing the deal with Lockheed in May.

“It uniquely adheres to the base metal,” Sullivan said. ”You can put it on as a top coat, but it changes the surface characteristics,” making water and oil slide right off.

AeroPel has not been tested on stealthy flight surfaces yet, so for now, it will be used for non-stealth components and ground support equipment. 

But Sullivan hailed the implications of a corrosion-resistant coating that can be applied by “an 18-year-old with a certain level of education, with minimal training.”

Such coatings may reduce maintenance costs enough for the Pentagon to buy more aircraft, Sullivan said: “What they want is more aircraft. These kinds of new technologies enable that whole tail to become less expensive, which means you’ve got more resources to put into other things.”

“We thought the sense of time, the sense of urgency, is a really big deal, because of some of the challenges in the region.… This is kind of our way of going fast, where Lockheed will implement, will train, provide all the chemistry, the methods, the tools, and we can get this executed really fast.”