Troy Design & Manufacturing (TDM), a wholly owned Ford subsidiary based in the Detroit area, has automated the verification of critical safety components fitted to first responder vehicles using passive UHF RFID. The project, described in a case study published by tag maker Beontag on 25 October 2024, gives the company a 100 per cent read and validation rate in a plant packed with metal tooling, vehicle bodies and competing RFID traffic.
The work was carried out at the TDM Modification Center in Chicago, where vehicles are converted and fitted out after they leave the main assembly plant. The component in question is installed inside the vehicle’s side chassis, which means that once the build is complete an operator cannot see it, reach it or confirm it by eye. TDM wanted an automated way to capture what had been fitted, when and where, and to prove it at the end of the line.
Filtering the right tag out of a crowded plant
TDM was already using RFID to identify vehicles moving through assembly, which created the central problem: a new system reading critical components would be operating in an environment where hundreds of other transponders were in range. The answer was tag masking. In EPC Gen2, the air interface standard behind RAIN RFID and also published as ISO/IEC 18000-63, a reader can issue a Select command carrying a bit pattern that a tag’s memory must match before it will take part in the inventory round. By masking on the data format it had chosen for the safety components, TDM made every other tag in the building stay silent.
The system also had to slot into software that was already in place. “The system had to integrate with what was already there,” said Lorin Sommer, TDM IT Analyst, noting that the crowded assembly area had no room for additional computer systems.
The tag had to survive 120C for 48 hours
Metal detunes a UHF antenna and reflects the reader’s signal, so a conventional label was never an option. TDM evaluated dozens of products before settling on the Confidex Steelwave Classic, an on-metal hard tag measuring 115 x 30 x 3.9 mm and rated by the manufacturer at up to 20 m (65 ft) read range. Confidex is a Finnish industrial tag maker founded in 2005 and headquartered in Tampere, acquired by Beontag in 2022, and the Steelwave Classic was previously sold as the Confidex Carrier Tough II.
“Confidex Steelwave Classic is a great option for environment that involves various surfaces, including metals and plastics. With consistent performance on different surfaces the operator does not need to select the tag based on the asset but can use the same tag for all,” said Miika Pylvanainen, Director of Product Line RFID at Confidex. He added that the printable face is sealed under a transparent layer for durability against chemicals and friction.
Testing was done in Ford’s own facilities and was punishing: exposure to roughly 120C for as long as 48 hours at a stretch, plus humidity and vibration. The tags passed.
Why 496 bits of EPC memory mattered
TDM wanted the tag itself to carry the component serial number and further identifying data, rather than acting purely as a pointer to a database record. That rules out most standard tags. A typical UHF transponder ships with 96 bits of EPC memory, which is sized for a single serialised identifier such as an SGTIN-96 and very little else. The Steelwave Classic variant TDM selected uses an Impinj chip offering 496 bits of EPC memory plus 128 bits of user memory, and the two banks serve different purposes: the EPC bank is what the reader returns during inventory and what a mask can filter on, while user memory holds additional data read separately.
That capacity was “more than enough memory space to encode what the business required,” said Diana Pardo, TDM IT Analyst.
Reading a part nobody can see
Tags are now interrogated at set points along the line and again at end of line, after the component has been enclosed within the side chassis and is out of line of sight. If the end-of-line scan does not return the expected data, the vehicle is flagged as a mis-build and diverted to the repair station rather than leaving the plant. For a safety component on a first responder vehicle, that distinction carries obvious liability weight for both TDM and Ford.
The reading hardware came through Atlas RFID, a US distributor and integrator based in Birmingham, Alabama, which supplied handheld readers from TSL (Technology Solutions UK Ltd), a British maker of Bluetooth connected RAIN RFID handhelds. The two companies then tuned the reader configuration for the plant. For operators the result is less paperwork and fewer errors; for TDM’s customers it is a traceable record of each component, its installation date and place, and the vehicle it ended up in.
“What has made this such a success story was our partnership first with Confidex, and Atlas RFID and TSL,” said Pardo.
More manufacturing and traceability deployments are collected in our case studies and asset tracking sections.
Read more at https://www.beontag.com/cases/tdm-automates-identification-of-critical-vehicle-safety-components/
