Startup enables 100-year bridges with corrosion-resistant steel

Summary

According to the American Road and Transportation Builders Association, one in three bridges needs repair or replacement, amounting to more than 200,000 bridges across the country. A key culprit of America’s aging infrastructure is rebar that has accumulated rust, which cracks the concrete around it, making bridges more likely to collapse.Now Allium Engineering, founded by two MIT PhDs, is tripling the lifetime of bridges and other structures with a new technology that uses a stainless steel cladding to make rebar resilient to corrosion. By eliminating corrosion, infrastructure lasts much longer, fewer repairs are required, and carbon emissions are reduced. The company’s technology is easily integrated into existing steelmaking processes to make America’s infrastructure more resilient, affordable, and sustainable over the next century.“Across the U.S., the typical bridge deck lasts about 30 years on average — we’re enabling 100-year lifetimes,” says Allium co-founder and CEO Steven Jepeal PhD ’21. “There’s a huge backlog of infrastructure that needs to be replaced, and that has frankly aged faster than it was expected to, largely because the materials we were using at the time weren’t cut out for the job. We’re trying to ride the momentum of rebuilding America’s infrastructure, but rebuild in a way that makes it last.”To accomplish that, Allium adds a thin protective layer of stainless steel on top of traditional steel rebar to make it more resistant to corrosion. About 100,000 pounds of Allium’s stainless steel-clad rebar have already been used in construction projects around the U.S., and the company believes its process can be quickly scaled alongside steel mills.“We integrate our system into mills so they don’t have to do anything differently,” says Jepeal, who co-founded Allium with Sam McAlpine PhD ’22. “We add everything we need to make a normal product into a stainless-clad product so that any mill out there can make a material that won’t corrode. That’s wha...