The effectiveness of passive RFID Tags in the presence of charged particles

Passive Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) Tags (also called Transponders) are being widely used in Item Level tracking. This includes shop floor of supermarkets, pallet/items in warehouses and also for luggage tracking at airports. Many of the mentioned operations make use of commercial tags with an operating frequency of 13.6 MHz. Data is transferred to the chip through the antenna from an RFID Reader/Writer which generates a strong EMF. Published data has shown these Tags can be subject to ESD where the chip can be damaged or have a reduced operational life cycle. Initial trials have taken place using commercial 13.56 MHz Tags to check the transfer of data during the read cycle. Tags are coated with electrostatically charged particles manually and also using tribo and corona systems. The objective of this study is to monitor if the stored information is either corrupted or attenuated by the presence of the charged particles of powder/dust. The initial results indicate the presence of charged particles attenuates the response with respect to the distance required between the Tag and the reader to allow the data to be read but the actual data is unaffected.