Design of Passive UHF RFID Tag Antennas and Industry Application

Abstract: Nowadays, there is a growing demand for reliable assets security and management in various industries. The company SolarWave is eager to implement a comprehensive security system to produce active protection for their expensive product: solar panels. This security system is not only including assets tracking, monitoring but also combined with a control system, which is used to binary control a switch of solar panel to be on in presence of the correct ID and off in absence of the correct ID. One of the technologies that made this concept viable is known as Radio Frequency Identification (RFID). The thesis project is a sub-project in the development project whose content is mentioned as above. It contains two main parts. One is the system solution for the company. The other is RFID tag design which is in parallel with the company solution in order to reach a scientific level of a master thesis. In this thesis, I systematically analyze the operating mechanism and characteristics of RFID, and propose both active and passive RFID solutions for the company. And I also suggest an alternative radio technology ZigBee which can be used instead or as a complement to RFID. Meanwhile, I propose two designs of RFID tag according to the specification of the solar panel. One is modified meandering antenna. This kind of antenna is very effective and popular in RFID tag design in order to minimize the size of antenna. The other is inductively coupled loop antenna. It is a very useful method for conjugate matching in RFID tag antenna. The required input resistance and reactance can be achieved separately by choosing appropriate geometry parameters. It makes the antenna easier to match to the tag chips. Both the RFID antenna designs are simulated on Ansoft HFSS 12.