Amidst the appearance of the Omicron variant, researchers from the University of Hong Kong have reportedly developed a stainless steel alloy that can kill 99.75% of the Sars-CoV-2 virus.
This new alloy can eliminate the virus at 99.75% effectiveness in 3 hours and 99.99% within 6 hours.
The brains behind the invention are also in talks with manufacturers to assess the feasibility of creating steel products, such as lift buttons, doorknobs and handrails.
According to The Straits Times, researchers in Hong Kong have reportedly developed new stainless steel with the ability to effectively eliminate Covid-19 within hours.
The research is being led by Professor Huang Mingxin and Professor Leo Poon.
This newly-developed alloy can reportedly kill 99.75% of the Covid-19 virus within three hours and 99.99% within six hours.
This new alloy of stainless steel combines both copper and steel. According to Yahoo Finance, scientists have discovered that pure copper possesses excellent antiviral efficiency towards Covid-19 and other viruses.
However, pure copper is costly to use and lacks strength, and so they embarked on making an alloy of stainless steel with 20% weight copper.
This proved to be much more effective and cost-effective at killing the Covid-19 virus as compared to stainless steel on its own.
The antimicrobial property is also described to be “long term” and can withstand considerable damage without losing its effectiveness.
The process of creating this new stainless steel utilises a “powder metallurgy” technique which lowers the overall product cost.
Talks are currently ongoing with industrial partners in regards to the creation of steel products.
These would include the likes of lift buttons, doorknobs and handrails, as they’re some of the most commonly touched surfaces in public areas.
The potential upside of adopting this new material would be a significant reduction of disinfection costs in public areas.
Currently, the Covid-19 virus can purportedly stay on surfaces for more than two days.
There is a well-known proverb that reads, “Necessity is the mother of invention”.
The pandemic has stricken us for 2 years now and although signs are pointing in the right direction, it hasn’t stopped the world’s most brilliant minds from developing new products.
Hopefully, the alloy can be rolled out to public spaces so that we can keep Covid-19 spread at bay.
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Featured image adapted from Raymond Ling on Flickr.
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