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In an industry driven by continuous improvement, automotive manufacturers and their suppliers constantly seek new ways of ensuring quality, reducing production and warranty costs, and speeding assembly processes. By producing traceability codes, testing data, product information, and assembly identifiers on a wide range of parts, non-contact, ink jet coding technology effectively meets these, and other, specifications. While it is necessary to identify an ink jet printer that has the hardware and software capabilities to properly integrate within the production line, it is often times the ink jet ink itself that determines the solution. This paper will review the primary automotive applications of ink jet coding, and highlight the fluid properties that support these specifications.

Two-dimensional (2D) codes offer several advantages over conventional bar codes for marking parts and assemblies. This paper will review the key attributes of 2D codes, including data density, readability, and error correction capability. Featured applications will demonstrate the use of 2D codes to identify and track automotive parts throughout production and assembly processes. Although 2D codes can be applied by contact and non-contact technologies, this paper will focus on ink jet printing and laser coding to provide specific examples of the benefits of on-line, real time, non-contact product identification. Finally, code reading devices, on-line and hand-held, will be introduced.