additives feature | Anti-counterfeiting technologies
Aston Martin recalled 17,500 cars after counterfeit polyamide was used in an accelerator pedal arm
theirs before beginning the repair process. Anti-counterfeiting additives, particularly those embedded in packaging, may also be used to provide authentication before a product is put on a store shelf, says Mark McManus, senior engineer at Ampacet. Because packaging security features can be
compromised, however, securing the packaging does not ensure that the item inside is authentic. “More manufacturers are looking to embed something in the product itself that becomes an indelible, permanent feature surviving the product’s life cycle,” says Kent Mansfield, president of TruTag. Skidmore also notes this trend to using anti-coun-
terfeiting measures with both the package and the product itself. “Taggant in the polymer itself can be used to authenticate a product at any stage of the supply chain. OEMs or brand-owners can use the taggant as an auditing tool to check that the specified polymer is being used and used at the right level (not diluted),” she explains. Another use is authenticating product involved in litigation because of product failure. “Where we are really seeing adoption here is where
materials are required to meet certain regulatory specifications and less-than-scrupulous suppliers are attempting to pass off materials as meeting those specifications, when in reality they don’t,” adds James Petrie, marketing director, PolyOne Color & Additives North America. “Another application area affects OEM brand owners across their supply chain. They may have contractors who introduce lower quality materials in hidden components that are critical to the assembly and overall quality of the end product. These products start failing when the critical component fails, which in turn can create warranty issues, brand equity and consumer safety issues.”
44 COMPOUNDING WORLD | November 2014
Covert action Covert taggant or tracer technologies involve an additive and a means of detecting the additive. They are available at various levels of sophistication. “A low-tech and low-cost solution, for example, is to use one of many additives that fluoresce under ultraviolet light and can be detected with an inexpensive UV flashlight,” explains Ampacet’s McManus. “The disadvantage of simple technologies is that they are more easily counterfeited. Higher levels of sophistication are more difficult to duplicate. Both complexity and the number of different types of covert technologies have expanded in the past decade.” Ampacet’s SecurTrace masterbatches use a range of technologies based on the company’s 25 years of experience in designing products for these applications. A simple technology is a pigment, such as phthalo-
cyanine, which can be detected under a specific wavelength of light, explained Chroma’s Swain in his presentation at the Compounding World Forum. Other pigments cannot be seen in the visible colour spectrum but fluoresce when an ultraviolet light or “black light” is applied. These pigments, such as Chroma’s Viblo (visible in black light only), are inexpensive, but because they are not light-stable they cannot be used for outdoor applications, said Swain. Another popular technology is variochromatic pigments that dramatically shift colour, for example from blue to red, at different viewing angles. Additives that convert infrared (IR) to visible light can be detected with an inexpensive device, such as an IR laser. Another technology is isotopes or “molecular holographs” that have the same molecular weight as the material they are protecting and can only be detected with spectro- scopic techniques, such as NQR or NMR. Although this is an expensive detection test, it is used to verify some raw materials in the plastics industry as well as other industries, noted Swain. Taggants are light- and heat-stable micron-sized particles containing unique identification informa- tion; the particles are difficult to replicate and can be readily detected with various methods, such as microscopy or IR light. These “colour-coded wafers” can be used in opaque, coloured plastics and can incorporate various other technolo- gies, such as detection with specific light wavelength. Molecular
taggants are clear when compound- ed into resins and are detected only with special equipment. Microscopic or molecular taggants can be expensive, especially for small amounts of plastic (for example
www.compoundingworld.com
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