Serial number recovery

The Application of Materials Science Methods to Forensic Problems—Principles, Serial Number Recovery, and Paper Identification... 

Chemical or Electrochemical Serial Number Recovery Methods. These methods form the bulk of the procedures in current practice in crime laboratories they are therefore discussed here in more detail than other, still experimental techniques. 

Magnetic Methods. The preceding methods are destructive tests in that the restoration technique permanently alters the speciman. If improper conditions are applied in destructive tests, there is often no second chance to recover the number. Nondestructive methods are therefore especially attractive. Several promising, nondestructive approaches for serial number recovery from ferromagnetic alloys are based on the magnetization behavior of the metal. The potential of this method has been realized (15) but appears not to have been fully exploited. 

In the following sections, we outline the possible scope of this new field and we illustrate the use of materials science methods in criminalistics by discussing two examples the recovery of erased serial numbers and the identification of papers from their inorganic components. 

A common criminalistics problem to which materials science technology is applicable is the recovery of serial numbers which have been obliterated from metal items. We discuss here the metallurgical background of serial number obliteration and recovery, the theory and practice of chemical or electro-chemical methods which form the bulk of the presently employed methods, some techniques based on alternate approaches that are mostly experimental or have been proposed and, lastly, a recently developed serial number marking technique capable of producing more permanent markings. 

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