Towards Measurement Range Extension of UHF RFID Temperature Sensors for Industrial Applications

Digitization is a priority and a key tool to support the development of the Industry 4.0. Many industries, like the automotive sector, rely on complex and costly processes that are still not completely digitized, suffering from poor traceability and limited optimization options due to the lack of proper knowledge of the process internals. In this article we focus on a highly relevant industrial process as part of the automotive assembly line, the painting process, which requires a fine control of the entire cycle temperature without requiring costly operations or complex human interventions. In this article, we propose a novel cost-efficient method for sensing high temperatures with standard UHF RFID sensors. By using low thermal transmission insulation and polynomial models, we achieve to predict temperatures around 200°C/400°F with 1.5 % error. We believe our proposal opens novel opportunities in the industry to a more cost-efficient fine-grained and process tailored temperature measurement under high temperature conditions.