ABSTRACT
Nowadays, hospital-acquired infections is the major problem in the health sector. These infections are mainly spreading through touch surfaces in the hospitals. It is well proved that copper has an inherent property to kill the microbes while they are in contact with the microbes. Hence, the hospital touch surfaces made of copper is a feasible solution for the hospitalacquired infections. The current chapter is discusses on the preparation and characterization of the copper coatings for antimicrobial applications. The copper-coated touch surface has the advantages such as tunability of surface morphology, easiness to coat on any complex shapes, high purity, usage of less material, etc., as compared to the touch surface made by using bulk copper. This chapter deals with the mechanism of killing microbes by copper as well as the different methods of copper coating techniques, such as thermal evaporation, E-beam evaporation, sputter deposition, chemical vapor deposition, electroless deposition, and electrodeposition. The characterization techniques for thickness measurements, mechanical
properties measurements, residual stress measurements, microstructural studies, and antimicrobial properties are discussed in the present chapter.
