IAG December 2015

Tech Talk
“The Louisenthal facility is nestled
in the Bavarian countryside an hour’s
drive south of Munich”
A particularly memorable seminar session – featuring Marc
Mittelstaedt, G&D’s head of banknote design – provided a layer-bylayer
exposition of the creation of a new banknote. As G&D points
out in its promotional literature, banknotes are an expression
of the identity of a nation, serving in a way as calling cards.
The creation of banknotes is therefore a complex art, melding
aesthetics and the latest advances in security technology. To
illustrate the various steps in the process, Mr Mittelstaedt’s team
designed and produced a colorful sample banknote — after the
Bauhaus-style, the influential art school that played an important
role in Western architecture in the 20th century — incorporating
all the latest security features.
The base layer consists of the banknote substrate. Banknote
substrates incorporate several embedded components such as
watermarks, which have been an important security feature for over
100 years, as well as security threads.
Adjusting for differing climactic and circulation conditions across
countries, G&D treats substrates with special coatings before and
after printing to maximize the durability of banknotes within their
given environment, while ensuring the security features are not
compromised in the process.
The next step involves printing of the background using a
simultaneous offset method that makes possible security features
such as see-through registers and intricate, multi-colored designs.
Additional invisible but multicolor luminescent motifs, which appear
under UV light, may also be included.
Then comes a layer of intaglio printing, a technique whereby an
image is engraved into a metallic printing plate, and the incised line
or sunken area holds the ink. This gives banknotes their unique strong
colors and contrasts, the tactile texture and high-quality appearance.
The final stages involve screen printing and numbering. Screen
printing is used to apply layers of newly developed functional
pigments that can produce striking dynamic effects. Furthermore,
the thickness of the coating involved in screen printing produces a
substantial optical brilliance along with a high level of resistance to
wear and tear during circulation.
The all-important sequential serial numbers are added using
letterpress printing. There are various options when it comes to
serial numbers. They can be encrypted or designed to be additionally
machine-readable, using magnetic pigment, for example. In addition
to traditional numbering, G&D has also introduced the laser as a
printing tool, making it possible to integrate the serial number into
the banknote in whole or in part, possibly as a color motif within
the area of the watermark, or a hologram — providing yet another
line of defense against would-be counterfeiters. In the last step of the
cash cycle, banknote processing systems, equipped with high-tech
features such as very sensitive sensors, immediately detect and reject
all counterfeits or banknotes with defects.
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inside asian gaming December 2015