Bonding studies for thermally sprayed copper alloy antimicrobial coatings

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Aereus Technologies is an Ontario-based company and has developed the innovative antimicrobial coating technologies (Aereus Shields) for touch surfaces of healthcare materials. We had established a partnership via an initial engage grant project to address the challenging problem of the weak adhesion between the metallic coating and plastic composite materials. The team explored alternative treatment processes for bonding metal to plastics because the current industrial practice is too labor and energy intensive for manufacturing. We were able to develop a new process that is not only able to mechanically bond the metal coatings to plastic substrates of different surface types, shapes, and sizes, but can also be potentially integrated with the existing commercial manufacturing processes of plastics. The proposed Engage Plus project is to extend this project to further evaluate the viability of this new coating process. The coating products from this process will be evaluated in terms of bonding strength and wear resistance to provide data for possible integrations of the products in industrial applications.