Bending and Folding Effect Study of Flexible Fully Printed and Late-Stage Codified Octagonal Chipless RFID Tags

In this paper, octagonal chipless RFID tags are introduced and herein, the design development, the applied fabrication, and the experimental verification are presented. The designed tags, which are based on frequency-selective surfaces, are produced by screen printing on low-cost flexible materials including plastic and paper. A novel codification technique specifically conceived to complement the high yield manufacturing processes is proposed. Through an extensive measurement campaign, the octagonal chipless RFID tag functionality is proved. The experimental results include the morphological characterization, ID code verification, and a complete study of the bending and folding effects on the tag. Focusing on this, a working bent tag with a curvature radius down to 16 mm is reviewed. Additional characteristics like the polarization independence and extended read ranges are also corroborated.