Design and Development of RFID Label for Steel Coil

Although RF identification (RFID) technology has had a remarkable impact on various industries in recent years, designing RFID tags for metallic objects with satisfactory performance is still a challenge. So far, only few success stories have been reported in the steel industry. This paper presents the design and development of RFID labels for steel coils. In order to achieve automatic inventory during the product-delivery process, a novel antenna structure based on the principle of a monopole antenna has been designed, and the performance has been verified through measurements. In order to minimize the implementation cost added to the product line, the RFID tag is embedded into a barcode label with special perforations. A site test demonstrates that the developed tag has excellent performance, enabling automatic inventory using fixed readers.