During the past months one topic has reached all the main news around the world… COVID-19. During this pandemic, awareness of prevention and the implementation of new strategies to create materials with antimicrobial benefits have grown. In consequence, we want to share with our clients some comparisons between materials with antimicrobial properties. We'll address Copper and as well as Stainless Steel.

Copper has been one of the most ancient metals used in the world. It has been used in different sectors of daily life such as construction, coins, power generation and transmission, plumbing, telecommunication links and many more. Beside these uses, lately during the past years, one of its main implementations has been on surfaces that constantly are touched by people in places as hospitals, schools, libraries, etc. When copper is used in high quantities on surfaces, it has the characteristic of creating holes on the cell membrane of the bacteria’s and destroying the DNA & RNA inside of them in a couple of hours and killing the 99% of the bacteria.

The occurrence of defects in sand-castings is usually higher than other manufacturing methods due to the sheer number variables that come into play during the process.

In foundries, turbulence during mold filling, contact of molten metal with a (usually cold and damp) sand mold and subsequent solidification means that there are many opportunities for something to go wrong.

Consequently, when sand-casting is compared to more controllable manufacturing operations such as machining or plastic injection molding, the rate of defect occurrence is usually higher by one or two orders of magnitude.

During the past several months, we all have had our lives affected not only in Canada, and North America, but also around the world by Covid-19. With the current pandemic of this deadly virus, increasing awareness and supporting the implementation of antimicrobial/antibacterial materials is imperative for our industry. Therefore, we wanted to share some information that may, and should be of interest, specifically the Antimicrobial benefits of Copper and its alloys.

For more than 5000 years civilizations around the world have acknowledged, and understood the health benefits that Copper possesses. It is a self sterilizing, antimicrobial element. Copper, Brass, and Bronze kill greater than 99.9% of many bacteria within 2 hours of exposure, and will continue to kill bacteria offering long term protection whereas “Antimicrobial coatings” are fragile, and can deteriorate wearing off over time.

Sand casting is an extremely flexible process that can benefit from economies of scale when large production runs are needed but is also reasonably flexible to produce complex parts that usually replace several assembled and/or welded components.

Molds produced with silica sand have enough temperature resistance and mechanical strength to cast nearly every metal used in engineering like bronze, brass, aluminium, steels or cast irons.