The human arsenal has always been on the loaded side, and yet it has never possessed anything more valuable than that tendency of ours to grow on a consistent basis. This is because the stated tendency has already enabled us to hit upon some huge milestones, with technology appearing as a rather unique member of the group. The main reason why technology’s credentials are so anomalous is based on its skill-set, which was unprecedented enough to guide us towards a reality that nobody could have ever imagined otherwise. Nevertheless, if we look a little bit closer, it should become clear how the whole runner was also very much inspired by the way we applied those skills across a real-world environment. The latter component was, in fact, what gave the creation a spectrum-wide presence and made it the ultimate centrepiece of every horizon. Having such an ingenious tool run the show unsurprisingly scaled up the human experience in every conceivable sense, but even after reaching so far, the prodigious concept of technology will somehow keep on bringing all the right goods to the table. The same has grown to become a lot more evident in recent times, and truth be told, a new development from Texas A&M University should only make that trend bigger and better moving forward.

The researching team at Texas A&M University has successfully developed a new hidden magnetic tag, which is supposed to be imprinted within the manufactured hardware so to help the world in separating counterfeit goods from the real ones. Named as “Embedded Information in Additively Manufactured Metals via Composition Gradients for Anti-Counterfeiting and Supply Chain Traceability”, the project basically uses metal additive manufacturing techniques to accomplish its goal of effectively embedding readable magnetic tags. An example of this will be leveraging 3D printing to integrate these tags below the surface into nonmagnetic steel hardware.  Anyway, once fully integrated, you can read the stated tag through a dedicated magnetic sensor device or even your smartphone.

“The issue is that when I come up with an idea, device or part, it is very easy for others to copy and even fabricate it much more cheaply — though maybe at a lower quality,” said Dr. Ibrahim Karaman, one of the faculty investigators involved in the project. “Sometimes they even put the same brand name, so how do you make sure that item isn’t yours? (The embedded magnetic tag) gives us an opportunity and a new tool to make sure that we can protect our defense and manufacturing industries.”

Make no mistake; we already have a host of methods that can be used to imprint such information. However, most of these existing methods require sophisticated and costly equipment, something that makes them largely inaccessible for a bigger chunk of the population. Beyond the economic aspect, though, the metal tags also boast a major difference when it comes to technological construction.

“Different approaches have been used to try to locally change the properties of the metals during the manufacturing process to be able to codify information within the part,” said Salas Mula, another researcher involved in the study. “This is the first time that magnetic properties of the material are being used in this way to introduce information within a nonmagnetic part, specifically for the 3D printing of metals.”

For the future, the researching team plans to develop a more secure method of interpreting the relevant information. This talks to introducing a physical “dual-authentication” system, which will make the user apply a specific treatment or stimulus to unlock access to the magnetic tag.