Tobacco Asia

42 tobaccoasia / Issue 4, 2018 September / October The core technology behind ink-free print- ing and the manufacture of the mother plate was developed by Suzhou Laser's c.e.o., Hu Zuyaun. Hu has been engaged in the field of optical anti- counterfeiting technology for more than 30 years, has vast expertise in the area of optical security and has presided over or participated in dozens of national, provincial and ministerial-level science and technology projects. What makes NIP an excellent candidate for an almost impossible-to-emulate security printing meth- od is the extreme technical difficulty under which the optical patterns are produced. "The patterns impart overt, covert and forensic security features at the same time," Zhang elaborates. The overt se- curity features include 2D/3D, flip-flop, and color shifting designs. While covert security features may comprise micro text or images of just 0.02mm text in height and visible only under magnification. How- ever, Zhang declines to discuss closer details of the forensic security features as they are confidential. But Zhang also hints at the fact that NIP is not super cheap. There is a considerable cost fac- tor involved, at least initially, as "the tooling de- velopment is expensive compared with conven- tional printing methods." Though once set up, the cost factor will taper down as forthwith no consumables like ink are needed for production. "And the higher the output quantity, the cheaper it becomes," he claims. Artwork designs are gen- erally supplied by the customer, then aesthetically enhanced and rendered with the already described methods by Suzhou Laser's in-house designer team. "But of course we also can provide design proposals, and do so regularly," Zhang adds. Apart from cigarette soft packs and hardboxes, NIP can also be used on stickers, closure labels, and tear tapes, both on paper and plastic films such as PET, PETG, BOPP, MOPP, PVC, and others. As desired, QR codes may be incorporated into stickers and labels as well, which would serve track & trace and authentication purposes. Besides a growing number of cigarette manufacturers, Su- (AlpVision SA) zhou Laser is offering its security printing prod- ucts to the vaping industry, too, where it is primar- ily deployed on packaging materials. AlpVision: hands-on solutions AlpVision SA of Switzerland, with offices in the US and China and represented by printers in more than 50 countries worldwide provides security printing products for the tobacco and vaping in- dustries such as Cryptoglyph and Fingerprint. Launched in 2001, Cryptoglyph was first de- ployed on cigarette packaging in 2007. While the technology has been adopted by manufacturers around the globe, AlpVision's current key market is Europe, according to the company's c.e.o., Dr. Fred Jordan. "Cryptoglyph is basically an invisible pattern that is integrated in the varnish layer [of outer pack- aging] and is compliant with 100% of the printing so- lutions conventionally used for tobacco packaging." To be more precise, Cryptoglyph embeds a pseudo-random pattern of microdots measuring 10-20 microns in diameter in the printed material and across its entire surface. "The security pattern, which is completely invisible to the naked eye, is ap- plied by traditional printing techniques like offset li- thography, flexography, or rotogravure. Indeed, no special printing unit nor special consumable [ink] is required," Dr. Jordan elaborates. "The microdots are only penetrating the varnish layer to a fraction of its thickness, so it is a modulation of the surface shape rather than the creation of actual holes." And there is more to it: Besides being applied to packag- ing surfaces, the technology can even be used on the individual cigarette stick, for example by em- bedding the microdots on filter tip wrappers. The second security printing technology devel- oped by AlpVision is Fingerprint, which primar- ily is deployed by vaping product and e-cigarette manufacturers. Fingerprint can be used for au- thenticity verification of molded, stamped, rolled or tooled objects such as plastic bottles and caps for vaping liquids, for example, but also on e-ciga- rette and/or atomizer bodies. "It could potentially also work on glass bottles, but as far as we know that has actually never been tried," says Dr. Jor- dan. "And when applying Fingerprint on vaping liquid containers, we would recommend authenti- cating the caps, which are often tamper proof, in order to avoid refilling issues." Fingerprint works on a simple principle, namely that each and any mold, stamp, or tooling gadget imparts microscopic material imperfections on its surface that are just as unique as a human finger- print. The irregularities will invariably transfer to the surfaces of vials, bottles, caps, e-cigarette hulls (you name it) during production, "imprinting" them on the surface. It is very much comparable to what is being done in forensic criminology by tying a bullet to the gun barrel from which it was fired.

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