How Can 3D Printing Help in the Fight Against Counterfeit Goods?

Over the years, the trade in counterfeit goods, mostly of luxury brands, has spread rapidly all over the world. Data from the OECD in 2019 already showed that the trade in fake goods amounted to about 3.3% of all world trade and was rising steadily. Moreover, some counterfeits today look so genuine that they can hardly be distinguished from the original. To address these issues, a research team at the University of Hong Kong (HKU) is working on the development of an extremely precise additive manufacturing process designed to detect counterfeit products and thus make it easier to remove them from circulation.

The fact that the value of counterfeit goods in circulation is estimated at several billion dollars not only affects the global economy, but also has consequences for security. Although there are already all kinds of measures taken by companies that want to protect their products from potential counterfeiting, there are still major obstacles in this regard. For example, one of these security concepts is the integration of a QR code, however this is not always the safest option as these can be very easy to reproduce due to limited data encryption capacity. Dr. Ji Tae Kim, who works in the mechanical engineering department at HKU and is the leader of the research team, has come up with a new way to detect such counterfeits thanks to a 3D printing process that will be used to produce polarization-encoded anti-counterfeiting labels.

Advantages of a 3D Label Versus a 2D Label to Identify Counterfeit Goods

It is not only the fact that the dimension of a 3D versus a 2D label is different, but also the digital information included with it. In this research, published in a paper titled “Three-Dimensional Printing of Dipeptides with Spatioselective Programming of Crystallinity for Multilevel Anticounterfeiting,” researchers used diphenylalanine (FF) as a material allowing them to 3D print dipeptides. Dipeptides are chemical compounds consisting of two amino acid residues. The researchers at HKU chose to develop these because of their unique properties. The Dr. Yang, lead author of the study conducted, noted particularly the piezolectricity and optical optical birefringence  in dipeptides due to their crystalline nature.

Dr. Ji Tae Kim explains the procedure of the new 3D printing method in detail, focusing on the fact of molecular self-organization controlled by nature, which is ultimately responsible for the printing of multi-part 3D FF micropixels. The entire research team therefore also pays special attention to the micropixels with programmed crystallinity, which are responsible for high-density data encryption. Dr. Kim comments, “Our new 3D printing method combined with nature-driven molecular self-assembly can print multi-segmented 3D FF micro-pixels with programmed crystallinity for high-density data encryption. By utilising different responses of the amorphous and crystalline segments to polarised light, a tiny single 3D pixel can encrypt a multi-digit binary code consisting of “0” and “1″. The information capacity can be increased to 2¹¹ with a single eleventh-segmented freestanding pixel on a tiny 4 µm² area which is 1000 times smaller than a hair strand.”

Overall, the team is confident that this 3D printing process can greatly enhance security and prevention of counterfeiting in the future, allowing security labels to be customized and produced anywhere and at any time, thus contributing to information security. If you want to learn more about HKU’s project, you can find the research paper HERE.

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*Cover Photo Credits: MDR