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Security Printing: A tale of magnetism and chemistry

Easter Prince January 25, 2021

The forging of documents and counterfeiting practices is growing rampant. Especially stamp papers, bank cheque forms, currency notes, and passport are the worst hit documents due to the forgery. This has made the printing industry to stand on the toe to innovate methods and materials to avoid document forgery. The security printing industry is under the invasion of technology growth that reduces the usage of physical documents thereby losing the market share. This scenario has mandated the security printing industry to fast track the innovation.

 

Our Customer’s Business

Our customer is an ink specialist, they produce specialty inks for printing banknotes and identity documents such as passports, driving license, visa, etc., This versatile ink material stands compatible with the industrial printing systems such as intaglio, silkscreen, flexography, gravure, letterpress, offset and inkjet. These inks are formulated with fine chemicals to meet the highest standards of the security industry. Government authorities deploy digital stamps to manage the import, export, and monitor the supply cycle of goods such as spirits, wines, tobacco, etc, These special inks ensure the differentiation between legitimate and illicit goods.

In Government’s monitoring process our customer’s ink technology plays a pivotal role. This critical nature of the business mandates our customers to innovate new pigments for staying ahead in the industry.

Challenge

To analyze and recommend the technology to formulate new ink for the security printing application that may be utilized in all forms of printing systems such as intaglio, silkscreen, flexography, gravure, letterpress, offset and inkjet.

Our Solution

Our technical team reviewed the product road-map of the customer and advised the following

  1. A dielectric – metal-dielectric layer structure, irrespective of the complexity of the layering the optical variability is controlled and hard to tamper.
  2. The inspiration for the arrangement is drawn from the cosmetics industry that deploys a similar recipe for the preparation of nail varnish.
  3. A covert magnetizable component is added that can be captured by the sensor signals, which distinguishes the genuine from the counterfeit.
  4. We outline the possible chemical composition of the pigments that were later established by the wet lab trials by the customer.
  5. The appropriate technology is advised based on the product road-map, application, and beneficial market lead time

Result

Our customer utilized the technology input from our experts and combined their wet lab capabilities to fine-tune the chemical composition of the recipe. We designed the experimentation scheme using a response surface methodology to narrow down to the optimal trials. This technology was brought to the market to cater to the security documentation application in 16 months of research efforts.
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