The application of RFID technology in large-scale dry bulk material transport system monitoring

The transport of dry bulk material is considered to be energy costly and environment impactive in industry production. Belt conveyors are widely used as an efficient mode in continuous material transport. To ensure healthy operation and to lessen environment impact, such material transport systems need to be monitored. A belt conveyor system may contain thousands of idler rolls. Any failure of the rolls will cause extra energy consumption and environmental pollutions such as dust, noise and material spillage. The large number idler rolls are the most difficult to be monitored due to the large-scale of the system. Traditionally, idler rolls are inspected individually and manually. This paper presents the research of wireless monitoring for group idler rolls. RFID technology is employed to build sensor nodes to transfer monitoring data via a node to node wireless communication network. A concept of self-power generation idler provides the energy harvest solution for the sensor nodes. The implementation of the wireless monitoring shows that RFID technology is a sound solution to automate the monitoring of large number distributed components in the wide area of material transport systems.