RFID Tire Management Applications

Many large vehicle management companies, such as bus companies, have a large number of internal tire items, frequent circulation, high frequency of data updating and heavy tasks for tire management personnel. In the use, maintenance, retreading and management of tires, the current approach is to manually branding the tire marking method, and then, using paper records to record the use of tires. However, there are many problems: manual branding and manual transcription can easily lead to confusion and subjective arbitrariness, and it is easy for a tire to correspond to more than one identification number, or more than one tire to correspond to a single identification number, which makes it impossible to track and query tire information. Manual branding will also produce damage to the tire and branding number is difficult to identify the problem; tire flow of the process of multi-processes, a wide range, often resulting in tire warehousing, distribution and information tracking in the state of unmonitored.

Therefore, one of the world's largest tire manufacturers Michelin began in all of the heavy trucks, buses and buses on the tire using embedded EPC UHF passive tags, and start the management of the corresponding UHF RFID system. As shown in Figure 8-18, for Michelin tires on the outside of the RFID logo and embedded UHF RFID chip location. Subsequently, the world's leading tire companies and vehicle management units have followed suit.

Figure 8-18 Michelin tires with UHF RFID tags

At the present stage of tire management in the use of electronic tags in two ways, respectively is implanted tire rubber and tire wall inlay way.

The implantation tire rubber way mainly by the tire producer completes. The rubber on the tire as well as the steel belt will affect the ultra high frequency RFID signal, therefore, these tags must carry on the specific environment antenna design: Uses the internal steel belt the coupling effect and takes into consideration the rubber material characteristic, thus guarantees the better signal transmission. The implanted tire rubber approach is characterized by the tag being built into the tire prior to the curing process. Once cured, it cannot be recovered. As shown in Figure 8-19, for the implanted tire rubber method of electronic tags, the middle is a PCB substrate, the substrate is welded to the QFN package UHF RFID chip, the substrate is connected to two springs on both sides of the array as a radiation dipole array. The resonant ring of this antenna is realized on the PCB substrate. The advantages of this spring tag are High Temperature resistance, corrosion resistance, vibration resistance and high stability.

Figure 8-19 Tire Spring Label

The tire inner wall inlay is a rubber material label into the tire inner wall, such as figure 8-20 shows for the tire inner wall inlay way electronic label. Uses the tire rubber will the electronic label fixes in the tire inside, because does not need to go through the tire vulcanization production process, compared with the spring label, the high temperature resistance, the corrosion resistance and so on the characteristic is poor quite a lot. The tire inner wall inlays the way generally uses in the tire management unit to its tire asset management, in the domestic commonly used in the bus management.

Figure 8-20 Tire Inside Rubber Label

In the application of bus tire management, you can use the above two ways, and are required to handheld recognition distance greater than 50cm. every tire operation, such as quality control, road team distribution, inventory, tire removal, etc., the management personnel only need to use the handheld scanning of tires, can be uploaded to the network management terminal tire operation information, the formation of electronic operation records. At the same time tires and bus vehicles can be realized binding, each bus front wind lower right corner affixed with a vehicle identification tag containing UHF RFID chip. The first time the tire is installed, you need to use a handheld machine to the body tag and tire tag binding, for tire maintenance, retreading to provide reliable data.
Compared with traditional technology, tire management using UHF RFID technology has the following advantages.
Non-contact data collection: UHF RFID technology greatly enhances the ability of managers to collect, exchange and track information on the object being collected.
High security: tag data access with password protection, identification code is unique, can not be imitated, and tag instructions encryption technology, this highly secure protection measures make the data on the tag is not easy to be forged and tampered with.
Volume miniaturization, shape diversification: can be made into a spring tag form implanted in the tire can also be made into a small piece of rubber embedded in the interior.
Reusable: UHF RFID chip life at room temperature up to 50 years, and supports more than 100,000 times repeated write.
In addition, the tire intelligent management system is perfected, but also with the bus intelligent hair, speed limit monitoring and other intelligent systems to connect, then, will greatly increase the safety of driving. For example, if in the process of driving, the tire pressure is far below or far above the normal value of the prescribed tire pressure, the system will automatically pop-up warning message, staff can be prompted according to the information timely and accurately to deal with, to avoid the occurrence of tire blowout accidents.