Card Material Requirements for Compliance

by Dr. Brad Paulson, Thor Engineering, ICMA Standards Representative

With the multitude of standards covering cards and related documents, it can be confusing to identify the appropriate requirements that need to be fulfilled for compliance. This is particularly apparent when evaluating materials requirements and test methods. The base standards, such as ISO/IEC 7810 Identification cards – Physical characteristics, are rather vague on specifying the material or the construction of cards, merely indicating that the card can be constructed in any manner, so long as it fulfills the requirements in the standard. Furthermore, ISO/IEC 7810 specifically states that durability is not addressed in the standard but is to be based on mutual agreement between the card supplier and purchaser. So, what is the purpose of the physical characteristics requirements in the standards, and what are the appropriate test methods to determine compliance and durability?

Fundamentally, the card standards are intended as a set of guidelines to identify the critical parameters required in international data interchange. As such, the standards establish limits and best practices to maximize reliability of the function of the card with the various pieces of equipment used to manufacture, personalize, and interact with the cards. Since technology is continually evolving, the standards are developed, modified, revised, or even abandoned as the technologies develop, mature, and fade. Consequently, standards trail technological development as the technology is implemented and refined. But in the end, the standards reflect the best understanding of the requirements necessary for reliable interaction of the card with card systems.

Since the standards define physical characteristics required for the cards, such as card width, height and thickness, methods to measure those characteristics must be defined and standardized. Methods for determining compliance with the standards are contained in test methods standards, such as ISO/IEC 10373, ISO/IEC 15416, and ISO/IEC 15457-3. However, it is important to remember that these test methods are only intended to verify compliance with the requirements specified in the standards. Regardless of the measured characteristic, these are intended as minimum requirements for functional interchange, and are not intended to evaluate durability.

On the other hand, there are a host of laboratory tests, both public and proprietary, that are used to compare the relative robustness of card constructions. Card Durability Test Methods, ANSI/INCITS 322, is a compilation of such test methods, and similar test method documents are under development in France, by Association Francaise de Normalisation (AFNOR), in Germany, by Deutsches Institut fur Normung (DIN), and in ISO Task Force 2 of Working Group 1 (WG1/TF2). These documents provide generally destructive methods for testing the strength, flexibility, abrasion resistance, and general durability of cards by flexing, rubbing, stretching, heating, freezing, and generally abusing them. In theory, by comparing the test results of different card types, it is possible to identify card structures that are more robust and those that are less robust.

However, durability test results are in units of force, cycles, pressure, or torque, and not in years of functional use; even when the test results are in units of time, the result is time under test conditions, not time of functional use of the card. Presently, there is no algorithm or accepted method to correlate any of the properties of the manufactured cards with expected life of the card when in use; that is, surviving a given number of flexure cycles does not equate to a specific number of years the card can be expected to be used without breaking. Likewise, surviving a given number of abrasive test cycles does not imply that the card magnetic stripe could be expected to function for any number of swipes or years in use. Too many extraneous factors occur while carrying and using the cards that make direct comparison of test results to card life difficult.

Currently, technical committees from AFNOR, ANSI, and DIN to WG1/TF2 are actively working on realizing a correlation between test results and expected life of cards in use. In fact, the ANSI/INCITS B10.3 Task Group on ID Card Durability and Service Life Standards voted at the 2007 winter meeting in Carson, California, to submit a committee draft of a card durability/service life standard for public review (the first step in publishing a standard). The committee draft takes an empirical approach to predict, or project, the failure rates of cards, prior to manufacture and issuance in given application environments. The strategy of the committee draft is to evaluate and score the intended card application, with the application score determining the application category, from 1 to 5. A set of tables is included to define the thresholds of durability test measurements for each of the five categories. While empirical in nature, the category measurement thresholds were selected to reflect the performance of cards of known constructions in known applications, including the cards that were issued at Xavier University in Cincinnati, Ohio in 2000 and 2001.

So, while current card standards specify minimum requirements for data interchange, they are not intended to assist in sorting through the available card constructions to select the appropriate materials for different applications. However, standards to provide assistance with selecting card materials and constructions for durability are actively under development, and we can expect published standards to be available in the near future.

Brad Paulson, Ph.D., is the ICMA Official Standards Representative and concurrently serves as principal and founder of Thor Engineering, a consulting company he started in 2001 to test and evaluate media and materials to determine failure modes and recommend material and process improvements. Views expressed here are his own. Questions? Contact Brad at Tpaulson@rconnect.com.