"HKU Mechanical Engineering Team Develops New Microscale 3D Printer for Multi-Level Anti-counterfeiting Labels"
Counterfeiting endangers the world's economy and security. The value of global counterfeit and pirated products is estimated to be between $1.7 and $4.5 trillion per year, according to a report issued by the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) in 2020. Conventional anti-counterfeiting approaches, such as QR codes can be easily fabricated because of limited data encryption capacity on a planar space. Therefore, researchers have been looking at increasing encryption density in a limited space. Dr. Ji Tae Kim of the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Hong Kong (HKU) led the development of a high-precision 3D printing method capable of producing new polarisation-encoded 3D anti-counterfeiting labels. This new 3D label has the ability to encrypt more digital information than a traditional 2D label. The work titled, "Three-Dimensional Printing of Dipeptides with Spatioselective Programming of Crystallinity for Multi-level Anti-counterfeiting," was published in Nano Letters. The new 3D printing method, when combined with nature-driven molecular self-assembly, can produce multi-segmented 3D FF micro-pixels with programmed crystallinity for high-density data encryption. A tiny single 3D pixel can encrypt a multi-digit binary code consisting of "0" and "1" through the use of different responses of the amorphous and crystalline segments to polarised light. This article continues to discuss the high-precision 3D printing method developed to produce new polarisation-encoded 3D anti-counterfeiting labels, which can encrypt more digital information than traditional 2D labels.