IMPROVING THE READABILITY OF RFID TAGGED PHARMACEUTICAL PRODUCTS AND FOOD SUPPLEMENTS INSIDE A MODIFIED SEALED TOTE
One of the biggest advantages of Radio frequency identification (RFID) technology is that it can be used to augment the security of the supply chain. A straightforward application area for which security is of utmost importance is the distribution and marketing of pharmaceutical products and food supplements. This research concentrates on using RFID technology for distributing these products securely by designing an RFID enabled system with a sealed tote and a portal that has the capability to read RFID tagged products inside the tote.
The challenge in using RFID to automatically, without human intervention identify the tote, its contents, and the RFID enabled security features are due to the problems related to tag readability near and through different materials. The solutions addressing these problems are developed for sealed totes by first analyzing the pharmaceutical products and purchase orders (PO) and evaluating the right RFID frequency for the pharmaceutical industry, then creating a novel structural design for the tote and a portal to reliably read the RFID tags on the contents of the tote.
The products in pharmaceutical supply chain were characterized in terms of physical properties and RF read performances to provide a repeatable and comparable evaluation. Products in each category were tagged and tested on conveyor belt, turn table and inside a tote with both high frequency (HF) and ultra-high frequency (UHF) RFID systems. The results show that UHF has better readability performance than HF in different speed levels and it is orientation independent where HF has statistical differences between 5 different orientations (0°, 45°, 90°, 135°, 180°). After deciding that UHF is more suitable frequency for the pharmaceutical application of RFID, using reflective materials inside the tote to control the propagation of UHF radio waves were evaluated by mapping of the RF field inside totes which have respectively 2,3,4,5 reflective materials coated sides. The results show that 5 metal sided tote has better RF propagation than any other configurations.
Finally in the comparison of read performances of regular, 3 and 5 metal sided totes, 3 metal sided tote has the highest read rate and highest percentage of getting 100 read rate from 100 POs within more efficient time period when the POs are offered 1 time, 2nd time and 3rd time reading attempts.