Clifford has a background in materials engineering, and worked for Teck as an undergrad student on a co-op doing corrosion studies on base metals, and became an expert on functional coatings for biomaterials.
Copper alloy surfaces are naturally antimicrobial with self-sanitizing properties, and research showed these surfaces eliminate up to 99.9% of harmful bacteria and viruses — but there was a lag time in killing gram positive bacteria — and that was the challenge to overcome.
“My idea was for copper – it has one limitation that it kills gram positive more slowly, if we could change the surface chemistry, the topography or roughness, we can kill bacteria more quickly,” Clifford told MINING.com.
“One way we can do this, is copper is antimicrobial because its actually corroding very slowly, so its not copper as a zero state that’s antimicrobial, its copper plus ions that kill bacteria.”
The Teck-branded covid…
