The objective of the paper is to show an approach for plagiarism detection with shape memory alloy (SMA) wires. The economic significance and damage caused by counterfeit products has been evident in industry and society for a long time. Especially the relocation of production facilities to low-wage countries, as well as the selection of suppliers under consideration of international price wars, increases the outflow of knowledge to third parties and countries with a higher density of counterfeit products. Therefore, companies are confronted with imitations of their own products, which are sold as plagiarisms via dummy companies in the market of the original manufacturer. In addition to the loss in sales and image damage for the original manufacturers, plagiarism in security-relevant components can also have disastrous consequences for the customer, but also for the original manufacturer from false product liability. Frequently, safety-relevant components such as rims, fire alarms or even contaminated medication also play a role. The consumer often has no chance to identify the detailed counterfeits. Since the product routes of counterfeits are very opaque, it is even more important to reliably identify originals. To protect against brand piracy, manufacturers increasingly use technical security measures to protect their products. There are different technical approaches to distinctively identify a product.

SMA elements can be treated to be used as a new kind of identification elements for products. In this paper a new method for coding information based on annealing of SMA wires is presented. The focus is the development of a heat treatment that provides different annealing temperatures in small adjacent areas along the wire. This method was used to program the internal electrical resistance feedback from a curved to a stepped behavior. Thus, the wire shows areas of constant electrical resistance and areas with a distinct resistance drop. Height and length of each step can be varied to implant a code on the internal resistance behavior. This can be used as plagiarism protection. The heat for the treatment is set by resistive heating. To adjust the desired temperatures in the wire, the respective areas were cooled by a specific airflow for each heat zone. The quality of heat area separation depends on physical heat flow mechanisms which can be optimized. Better quality of heat area separation and constant temperatures along each heat area improve the sharpness and distinction of the resistance behavior. Therefore, influences on the annealing process, like wire diameter, airspeed, electrical parameters and annealing duration were investigated. The results of the experiments as well as a possible approach for product protection are presented in detail.


Process Optimization of Local Annealing of Shape Memory Alloy Wires for Plagiarism Detection

Division / Sponsors: 
Aerospace Division

Paper Proceedings: https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/SMASIS/SMASIS2020/volume/84027

SMASIS2020 - Virtual Conference

Supporting the need among researchers worldwide for additional online and multimedia content, ASME now offers the ASME Conference Video Collection. This platform will collect and provide long-term access to conference presentation videos, encompassing all technology areas within ASME's technical conference and events program. About 30,000-40,000 engineers across all mechanical engineering and related disciplines participate in ASME conferences each year. This includes authors of approximately 6,000 to 8,000 technical papers published by ASME, the majority of whom also submit video presentations for our virtual conferences. The video collection will be available as an add-on to existing product packages or as a separate subscription.