Vollebak?s Metal Jacket Is Armor Against ... Something

And now Vollebak has turned its attention to the disease-resistant properties of copper.This story originally appeared on WIRED UK.Vollebak's new Full Metal Jacket is woven with more than 11 kilometers of copper thread, comprising some 65 percent of the coat. Once the metal face fabric and membrane have bonded, an abrasion-resistant polyamide backing is added.Vollebak states that the result is a waterproof and windproof jacket that is "high-performance" yet will wear like denim over time, with crease lines and color fading to gradually reveal the raw copper color. It may have a stronger antimicrobial effect than nanoparticles, but as it is not spread throughout the fabric this may require a virus to physically land on a copper strand and not the surrounding polyurethane in order to be killed."If something lands on the actual copper base, then copper will have an antimicrobial activity," says Bill Keevil, chair in environmental health care in biological sciences and head of the microbiology group at the University of Southampton. There are several published papers where, if you put a thin permeable barrier between copper and bacteria, where the bacteria can't physically touch the copper, then it doesn't work."Unfazed, Tidball is confident that the Full Metal Jacket—which Vollebak has been working on for years and, predicting what events may unfold, then stepped up production bringing forward release from September to today—will provide protection of some degree, and may also be a platform for more copper clothing, including gloves and face masks."We started the project three years ago.