Quality protection of capital goods based on unique and component inherent characteristics realized with a batch-fingerprint

• Applicant: Professor Dr.-Ing. Jan C. Aurich
• Subject Area: Production Systems, Operations Management, Quality Management and Factory Planning
• Term: from 2015 to 2019
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 261653082

The unambiguous traceability of capital goods and in particular of its components all along the supply and value chain is of central importance for the manufacturers and customers. The lack of traceability and the insufficient market transparency caused thereby have the effect that customers lose their confidence in product quality which also bases on the ability of proving the product origin. Additionally, manufacturers are threatened by the risk of unjustified liability claims referring to component failures which are not caused by the original equipment manufacturers. Currently, a lot of marking technologies implementing or at least applying signs for identification exists but due to their characteristics they can be copied. The research project focuses on the investigation of identification technologies based on unique and component inherent characteristics. By the stochastic distribution of these characteristics manufacturers and customers are protected against counterfeit products.The objective is the investigation of a unique distribution of material characteristics in single material batches. Therefore, the two spectrometric analysis optical emission spectrometry (OES) and energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDX) is used. The aim is to provide a unique batch-fingerprint which is characteristic for the entire supply and value chain and guaranties the traceability especially for capital goods components. Thereby, it is possible to identity heavily worn components. Unjustified liability claims against the manufacturer can be disproved with the batch-fingerprint. As the result, the unambiguous traceability is guaranteed and by doing so the quality of the capital good is protected.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants