Four million dollars will be making its way from the U.S. Air Force to Danville, thanks to a pair of contracts with Luna Innovations.

The company's nanoWorks division, as the name suggests, does research and development of materials on the nanometer scale. (A typical human hair is 50,000 to 100,000 nanometers across.) It will now be doing some of that work for the military.

The first contract, worth $1.7 million, comes from the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research, which focuses on basic research -- it isn't building new products, it's looking at ways technology and materials might be used in the future.

Brian Holloway, director of Luna nanoWorks, said the company will be working with the AFOSR to see how nanomaterials might fit into the future military's equipment.

Nanotechnology is a relatively new field, and the possibilities for nanomaterials are wide open -- they show promise as replacements for a variety of conventional materials.

For example, the modern Army relies more on electronic data than ever before. From battle groups to individual soldiers, a lot of information is being shared, and an enemy could try to jam that data flow. The Air Force wants to know if nanomaterials could be used to protect it from electromagnetic interference.

"The preliminary data is very good," Holloway said. "And the scientific basis for this is very strong." Still, it's a major step to go from what works well on paper to what will work in the battlefield.

In this case, at least a $1.7 million step.

And even if those materials turn out to be perfect for the job, they'll do no good unless they can be manufactured en masse. And that's the focus of Luna's second new contract -- actually a $2.3 million subcontract from General Dynamics Information Technology.

That money is for Luna to help to improve nanomanufacturing "in sufficient quantity, and at a sufficiently low cost, to be feasible for use in real-world systems," according to the company.

The company could not disclose whether these contracts will directly result in the hiring of new employees; it currently has six job openings in the Danville facility.

Its stock closed Monday in Nasdaq trading at $4.24, down 1 cent.