RFID to Improve Traceability in Continuous Granular Flows—An Experimental Case Study

Traceability is important for identifying the root causes of production-related quality problems. Traceability can often be reached by adding identification markers on products, but this is not a solution when the value of the individual product is much lower than the incurred cost of a marking system. This is the case for continuous production of granular media. The use of radio frequency identification (RFID) techniques to achieve traceability in continuous granular flows has been proposed in the literature. We study through experiments different methods to improve the performance of such an RFID system. For example, larger transponders and multiple readers are shown to improve the RFID system performance.