A novel stainless steel with intensive silver nanoparticles showing superior antibacterial property

Stainless steels (SS) are one of the most widely used, affordable materials in public areas, but suffer from a lack of antibacterial property. Unfortunately, traditional steel casting alloying strategy has limits to add Ag due to the extremely low solubility of Ag in SS. The present work demonstrates a novel powder metallurgy technology to fabricate Ag-contained SS with a unique microstructure in which the average distance between Ag particles is similar to the size of a typical bacterium, enabling the direct contact killing mechanism. Consequently, the new Ag-contained SS possesses an excellent and stable antibacterial rate of over 99%.