Anti-Counterfeiting Microparticles are Smartphone-Readable

According to a 2013 United Nations report, 2 to 5 percent of all international trade involves counterfeit goods. These products include electronics, automotive and aircraft parts, pharmaceuticals, and food. MIT chemical engineers have invented a new type of tiny, smartphone-readable particle that they believe could be deployed to help authenticate currency, electronic parts, and other products. The particles, which are invisible to the naked eye, contain colored stripes of nanocrystals that glow brightly when lit up with near-infrared light. The researchers can generate vast quantities of unique tags. With particles that contain six stripes, there are one million different possible color combinations. These microparticles could be dispersed within electronic parts or drug packaging during the manufacturing process, incorporated directly into 3D-printed objects, or printed onto currency.

Transcript

00:00:05 So basically counterfeiting is fraudulent and illegal activity and counterfeiting can take many forms. It can take the form of something that is relatively benign where let's say someone fakes up a Gucci handbag and tries to sell it and pass it off as a real one. It can also take the form of something a little more serious and potentially life-threatening where someone tries to introduce fake pills into the pharmaceutical supply chain. Probably the form that most everyone is familiar with is currency counterfeiting; suitcases of fake US currency showing up on the market. There's hundreds of anti-counterfeiting technologies out on the market right now but

00:00:44 most of them are very narrowly limited to certain circumstances or certain applications. Whereas ours can be made to fit the needs of many different applications. So the microparticles that we're making are approximately the size of them is about the width of a human hair, to give you some dimention. When you zoom in on each one of these particles it has individual stripes and each one of these stripes has a different color. So it is simply a combination of the number of colors and the arrangements of the stripes which gives the identity to the particle. So what we've actually done in this project is we've created a particle

00:01:23 motif and then actually shown that we can manufacture these with an extreme reproducibility which is really important if you are going to put them into any commercial application, and then read them out with very low error rates. So we're not mistaking the identity of a code when we read it out of blister pack or currency. And then anotther important thing we wanted to do is to make sure when we read them out you don't need a million dollar machine to read out the particle, but is something very small, compact and economical, and what we've been able to achieve is just simply using iPhones or consumer phones to read these out.

00:02:03 So this is the prototype decoder that we developed as a lab-scale. This device consists of three parts: eyepiece, the illumination part and the objective. So we can easily attach an iPhone to this device and then we can see our particles. So how would this actually work in practice. Let's assume you have some currency and you want to find out whether or not it is authentic. You would take the device, put it down onto the currency, shine an infrared light source in through here. The light would travel down, illuminate the particles which would then emit visible light. That visible light would travel back up through the lens and a picture of the particles

00:02:49 will be displayed on the screen of your smartphone. This is a lab-scale device and one of our future goals is to reduce the size of this down to something that can snuggly fit on the top of your smartphone. The current state these particles and the way we read them out are very general platform for anti-counterfeiting and the nice way about them is we can add other modules onto them and tailor them for individual niche markets. In pharmaceuticals you may want to not only have the particles we currently have but add on other sensors and we can very easily do this. I think what we're interested in the future is

00:03:27 thinking about each one of these markets and how we tailor the particles to address the needs in those markets.