Confidex Introduces RFID Tag for Wood Pallets
By Chaille Brindley
Date Posted: 4/1/2008
While wood may be a great material for building pallets and industrial packaging, it has some major drawbacks when it comes to radio frequency identification (RFID) technology. Confidex Ltd. (www.confidex.net), a Finnish developer of specialty RFID tags, has found some unique fixes to these problems with its new Confidex Pino™ tags.
The Confidex Pino has been specifically engineered for wooden objects, ranging from pallets to trees to finished building structures.
Kevin Donahue, Confidex’s director of business development for North America, said, “The challenge with wood has always been the moisture content because water sucks up RF energy.”
The Confidex Pino is an EPC Generation 2 RFID tag tuned to be right up against wood and actually imbedded into a board. Donahue said that the antenna design and tuning of the Confidex Pino is what makes it unique. Equipped with the 96-bit EPC-memory, it has additional memory for user specific information.
According to Confidex, its Pino tag has been successfully tested in stacked pallet tracking where the tags have been in the corner blocks enabling visibility to the readers even when handled with forklifts.
Donahue said that the Pino tag has a high accuracy read range of up to four meters with only one tag in the corner block of a pallet. This technology is ideal for any company looking to track a high-value wood pallet, such as a rental company or private pool operator. Although Confidex Pino costs more than other basic Gen 2 tags, its unique design ensures that the tag is protected and will function with high accuracy. The price point makes the Pino design cost prohibitive for pallets that are not in a closed loop system.
Donahue commented that he has not seen anything quite like this being marketed by other companies. He said, “Europe is probably a year or two ahead of where we are in the United States as far as RF technology.”
Hub télécom, a subsidiary of Aéroports de Paris Group, has developed a tracking system based on the Confidex Pino RFID tag for an asset management project in France. The project consists of RFID-equipped wooden pallets from Logistic Packaging Return (LPR) that are used by a food producer and a large retail company to automatically track their deliveries.
"Confidex Pino is a promising solution for wooden pallet tracking applications due to its performance, cost-efficiency, and easy installation on existing pallets, as well as on new pallets during production," said Jacques Vandeputte, project manager at Hub télécom.
Similar to a dowel concept, the Confidex Pino tag is inserted directly into wood. A hole is drilled in a corner blog and the tag is inserted. Teeth on the side of the tag allow it to secure and flush so that it is protected from damage.
A LPR (www.lpr.edu) press statement recently declared, “Apart from end-to-end pallet-tracking (through sorting, drop-off, pick-up, etc.), these chips will allow users for the first time to entrust pallets to carry data on their products and to share information about RFID events over an EPC-IS network. EPC-IS network differs from EDI in that all authorized parties have real-time access to the information: data is not held and then sent out by a third party.”
LPR is the second largest pallet rental pool in Europe. Based on extensive pilot tests, LPR has developed a re-usable, rewritable solution that it believes could one day replace barcode labels for customer packaging. The tag is capable of storing information about the pallet and the load itself.
LPR further stated, “Being re-usable (unlike labels or chips attached to the covers of loaded pallets), these new chips, embedded in the pallet blocks, are cheap and ecological. This position both protects them from impact and avoids strong encapsulation costs.”
