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Acciona, a leading Spanish construction company, has manipulated materials at the nanoscale to create buildings that have self-cleaning facades and concrete that is both stronger and uses fewer toxic materials.
Though construction companies usually deal with structures on a massive scale, engineers at Acciona have turned their attention to the nano-scale, manipulating particles a millionth of a meter in size, atom by atom, to aid in advances for the construction industry.
In one example, the company has developed a material to enable building facades to be self-cleaning. To achieve this, the company created a material – either a façade coating or a substance that can be embedded in the concrete itself - with photocatalytic properties: the material absorbs ultraviolet light, and, through the presence of a catalyst, breaks apart organic dirt. This technology also decontaminates structures, cleaning up more than 60 percent of harmful emissions from passing vehicles, such as volatile organic compounds and nitrogen oxides.
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