Document Type

Article

Publication Date

7-10-2017

Department

Department of Materials Science and Engineering

Abstract

Using pottery clay, porous ceramic stones were molded and then decorated with copper sub-microparticles inside the pores. Copper added antimicrobial functionality to the clay-based ceramic and showed ability in disinfecting water. Populations of both Staphylococcus aureus and Klebsiella pneumoniae in contaminated water were reduced by >99.9% in 3 h when exposed to an antimicrobial stone. This antimicrobial performance is attributed to a slow release of copper into water at both room and elevated temperatures. Copper is leached by water to produce ion concentrations in water at a level of 0.05–0.20 ppm after 24 to 72 h immersion tests. This concentration is reproducible over a number of cycles >400. To our knowledge, this is the first formulation of copper sub-microparticles inside the porous structure of commercial-sized ceramic stones that can disinfect bacteria-contaminated water over a period of at least several months.

Publisher's Statement

© 2017 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Publisher’s version of record: https://doi.org/10.3390/ma10070775

Publication Title

Materials

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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Publisher's PDF

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