Viruses and microbial pathogens can survive for hours on fabrics. This paper reports that copper-doping of natural and synthetic fabrics inactivates, within minutes, a human COVID surrogate pathogen. The fabric is embedded with copper particles by twin-wire arc thermal spray. The long-lasting fabric surface simultaneously provides good breathability, it is scalable and cost-effective. Virucidal activity is not affected by repeated washing of the fabric. Importantly, copper-embedded material will provide effective protection against all classes of pathogens, regardless of their mutation rates and infection strategies. It also can provide protection against all classes of pathogens, regardless of their mutation rates in industrial and residential filters.

Electrically conductive and flexible Aluminium coatings using powder and wire flame spraying were successfully deposited onto diverse textiles. The influence of different process parameters as well as the fabric materials on the electrical conductivity and microstructure of the metal-fabric composites were studied. Preliminary results show that in order to obtain excellent coating surface conductivity values, a specific coating quantity higher than 20 mg/cm 2 is necessary. After further optimization of the spraying parameters, a very good specific surface conductivity (~500 S i ) could be obtained even with reduced coating quantities. This corroborates that by performing an adequate parameter optimization a reduction of the specific coating quantity could be done while still keeping high conductivity values. Furthermore, when the coating quantity is reduced, the flexibility of the fabric substrates is better conserved. This study illustrates that optimized electrically conductive composites with flexible fabric substrates can be produced, without any preliminary thermal or chemical fabric specifications.

A pilot plant equipment for continuous coating of technical textiles is implemented to establish thermal spraying as a new and promising coating technique in the textile industry. In order to apply thermal spraying to temperature sensitive and flexible fiber structures two main difficulties have to be taken into account. First, the flexible structure of a textile fabric has to be fixed and stretched to achieve a sufficient mechanical support. Second, the kinetic and thermal energy of the molten particles and the hot gas jet may damage the fibers and their woven structure both mechanically and chemically. Special winding equipment is designed to allow various fabrics to be fixed and stretched in a way that enables the coating of wound fabrics from “coil to coil”. With this equipment even temperature sensitive fabrics, like cotton or polyester, but also aramide, carbon and oxide ceramic fabrics are coated by atmospheric plasma spraying or electric arc wire spraying in the case that higher deposition rates are required. Fabric coils up to a web width of 1500 mm can be coated continuously with a well-defined pre-stress in one single procedure.

In this paper, aramid and mullite light fiber fabrics are coated with different ceramics by atmospheric plasma spraying. To check the suitability of the process for as many technical applications as possible, different ceramic materials are used and multilayer coatings are produced as well. Test results for bioinert and biocatalytic materials, such as titanium dioxide and aluminum oxide, and bioactive hydroxyapatite show that the concept has good potential for a range of biomedical applications. Paper includes a German-language abstract.