Anticounterfeiting Options for Three-Dimensional Printing

Three-dimensional (3D) printing opens up new possibilities in customization and manufacturing, but brings with it tremendous intellectual property vulnerabilities, including financially motivated knockoffs and intentional sabotage. Novel methods for chemical tagging and authentication address these vulnerabilities, taking advantage of analytical advances to create fast, secure validate-anywhere options. Simply requiring that the blueprint file contain an authorization code is not enough to prevent all types of 3D counterfeiting. The authorization code validates the printing process, but leaves no trace of that validation (or the lack of it) on the product that is generated. New research, described here, uses under-the-surface taggant layers, detectable using portable chemical analyzers such as spectrometers. This under-the-skin tagging represents a substantial advance in security. The tagging in layers also represents a considerable advance over simply mixing a taggant chemical into a single printing medium since it makes possible a much larger number of tag options. The ability of UV-cured commodity chemicals to apply and adhere to a wide range of materials and remain undetectable in the visible spectral region is a key enabler of the technology. The near-infrared region of the electromagnetic spectrum has been shown to be useful for distinguishing specific regions of absorption of the tagging compounds not present in the substrate. This property is what makes the selected compounds particularly effective as covert taggants: the human eye cannot detect their presence, but the spectrometer can.