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ElemenTag is the nanomarker that blends into any material or product, to make it traceable, authentic and to fight against its counterfeiting.
About
Since 2017, at Particular Materials we have been synthetizing dozens of different classes of functional nanomaterials with our proprietary, continuous flow process based on supercritical water. Thanks to the expertise developed over the past 6 years, we can finely control the synthesis process to produce a huge number different nanoparticle compositions, combining different chemical elements and their relative concentration. We decided to exploit this capability to manufacture nanoparticles with an extremely precise composition and to use them as inorganic fingerprints for materials and products. Nanoparticles can be easily integrated into raw materials and products to be traced, adding an “artificial DNA” that allows a quick and accurate detection. We can verify the authenticity of materials and products in less than 3 seconds by scanning them with a hand-held XRF (x-ray fluorescence) gun.
Key Benefits
This represents a radical innovation for supply chain traceability and anti-counterfeiting measures, overcoming the main limitations of traditional technologies (QR-codes, barcodes, NFC, RFID, etc.). In fact, our solution is completely invisible to the naked eye, doesn’t alter the appearance nor the mechanical performance, can be fully embedded in the product or material (as a spray-on solution, within a surface coating or in bulk), is extremely hard to replicate, is processing-resistant, has high-encoding capacity and a simple point-and-shoot type of detection that requires no technical competence and is already available as an in-line tool for production lines.
Applications
Elemental enables full traceability and transparency for products and materials that today cannot be traced using incumbent technologies (e.g. raw materials, intermediate / unfinished products, certain small components, etc.) and gives companies a reliable and scalable solution for various B2B applications.
It can bring several benefits to both businesses and consumers
- Ensure product integrity by guaranteeing authenticity, embedding certifications and uncovering adulteration or dilution;
- Certify ethical sourcing and ESG compliance by verifying sources and origin of raw materials and products;
- Limit product recalls and dumping (minimizing legal, financial and brand exposure), by precisely identifying specific batches;
- Provide a new, highly secure protection layer against counterfeiting to protect consumers’ safety and companies’ brands;
- Supply chain accountability, by allowing companies to monitor their partners in a covert way;
- Bullet-proof traceability to protect manufacturers of critical and safety components against claims from end-users in case of failures due to replacements and substitutions with non-original / sub-quality spare parts;
- Empower customers in making more informed purchasing decisions thanks to a more transparent supply chain;
- Improve blockchain based solution by creating an actual link between the physical object and its digital twin.