How It Works
Grounded in history
The Copper Cover process brings together the fusion of ancient knowledge, cutting edge research, and a state-of-the-art application process that is fully mobile and can be brought directly to you, to fortify your bacterial and viral control.
Whilst the principles of antimicrobial copper have been well known, until recently, the only option was to replace regular fittings with copper fittings, which is unfortunately prohibitively expensive.
Brought to you by rocket power
Copper Cover has the answer with a technique known as ‘cold spraying’. This is an exciting, breaking edge, technological development that allows us to cold spray powdered elemental copper directly on to your metallic fittings and fixtures. The cold spraying process was discovered during thruster rocket nozzle research, and is patented for this application. For us, it permits the coating of existing fittings with a durable layer of copper at a much lower and economical cost.
The process works by feeding powdered copper into a supersonic stream of heated air, and accelerated very high speeds (close to Mach 2) upon impact, the copper particles embed on the surface, building up dense coatings of metallic copper. The result is an extremely durable coating of copper which achieves cohesion strengths comparable to that of a traditional weld, and is thus long lasting.
The Science
How does copper kill bacteria?
Several reactions take place simultaneously when copper comes into contact with bacteria; together, they inflict massive damage on the bacteria and cause its rapid death.
The two key effects are that:
Ionic copper causes pin-holing of the cell wall that contains the bacteria, causing cell contents to leak out.
A chemical reaction, known as a Fenton Reaction, takes place, in which cell fluids and copper react to form hydroxide free radicals. These highly reactive particles pull apart hydrogen atoms which are weakly attached to the cells’ DNA, destroying the bacteria’s life structure.
In addition, copper can “steal” electrons from the lipids in the bacteria’s membrane, causing oxidative degradation, and leading to cell death. (Lipid peroxidation)
How does copper destroy viruses?
The denaturing of a virus in many ways is like killing a bacterium, though having a much simpler structure, there are fewer stages of the process. Viruses do not have a cell wall like bacteria, but they do have an outer sheath
In the first stage of the process the highly ionic copper breaks down this viral sheath in a similar way to that seen by the bacteria cell wall.
In the second stage, the highly destructive Fenton reaction occurs. In this process, the copper is fundamental in the formation of the highly reactive hydroxyl free radicals – these free radicals work directly on the RNA strands within viruses, rapidly and irreversibly destroying them. Once its RNA strand is destroyed, a virus is obliterated and can no longer infect any host organism.