Abstract
The economic significance and damage caused by counterfeit products has been evident in industry and society for a long time. In addition to the loss in sales and image damage for the original manufacturers, plagiarism in security-relevant components can also have disastrous consequences for the customer. Manufacturers use technical features to identify their products. The aim of these features is to make them most difficult to copy or to find. None of these features are completely safe from being copied.
SMA-components can be treated to be used as a new kind of identification elements for products. In this paper a new method for coding information based on annealing of SMA-wires is presented. The focus is the development of a heat treatment that provides different annealing temperatures in small adjacent areas along the wire. As the annealing temperature has effects on the thermal resistance behavior of the SMA, a combined behavior of different annealing temperatures leads from a curved to a stepped resistance behavior when heated from martensite to austenite.
