Michelin is the French tyre maker headquartered in Clermont-Ferrand, one of the largest in the world, and it has UK manufacturing operations. Chainway is a Shenzhen based manufacturer of rugged mobile computers, handheld RFID terminals and fixed RFID infrastructure. The reader at the centre of the pilot is its U300, a fixed UHF unit.

What is being tracked here

The coils here are reels of production material fed into the tyre building process, such as wire, cord or rubber coated strip. They are not finished tyres. Each coil passes through several stages, and the plant needs to know where it is, when it cleared each process and how it moved along the line.

Chainway says that information was previously recorded by hand or typed into the MES, the manufacturing execution system that sits between the shop floor and the business systems and schedules, dispatches and records production work. Movement timings were never captured automatically, operators re-entered the same data, and reconstructing one coil’s journey after a quality issue took longer than it should have.

Fixed readers on the line

Michelin installed U300 readers at critical points on the line, mounted directly at the production equipment. A fixed reader differs from a handheld in exactly the way the name suggests: it is bolted in place and reads continuously as material passes, with no operator involved, where a handheld needs someone to pull a trigger. On a line that does not stop, only the fixed approach captures timing reliably.

The U300 runs Android 11 on board. Its working frequency covers 865-868 MHz, the European and UK band, plus 902-928 MHz and 920-925 MHz for other regions. It supports EPCglobal UHF Class 1 Gen 2 and ISO 18000-6C along with Impinj’s Gen2X extension, and Chainway quotes a fastest read rate of 1300 or more tags per second with a circular polarised antenna. Output power is 1 W (30 dBm), adjustable from +5 to +30 dBm. It takes DC 24 V, PoE or PoE+, has a 10/100 Base-T Ethernet port and GPIO, and supports external antennas. For this pilot Chainway points to the built-in Wi-Fi, which sends reads to the backend system without extra shop floor cabling.

What Chainway claims, and what is missing

Chainway reports that automatic identification replaced repetitive manual recording, that managers gained timelier visibility of coil movements through critical processes, that material histories now give quality investigators something to work from, and that operators do less data entry. It calls the pilot a successful demonstration of feasibility and a foundation for wider RFID deployment at Michelin.

Those are the vendor’s words rather than independently measured results, and the write-up is thin where a specifier would want substance. It does not say which UK plant, when the pilot ran or for how long, how many readers or tagged coils were involved, what read rates were achieved, who supplied the tags, or which MES receives the data. There are no percentages, no cost figures and no quotes from Michelin. Among steel, rubber and moving machinery, read reliability is the whole question, so a measured read rate from the line, with the tag type and mounting method stated, would be far more convincing.

Not the same as tagging tyres

This pilot is not Michelin’s much longer running work on RFID inside tyres, which is a separate programme. Michelin showed a transponder cured into the tyre carcass as far back as 2003, and a later generation co-developed with Murata has been fitted to several million Michelin tyres, largely commercial vehicle fitments. That work has its own standards: ISO 20909:2019 covers passive UHF RFID tyre tags in embedded, patch and sticker forms, with ISO 20910 the data coding and ISO 20911 the attachment classification. The Chainway pilot concerns material going into a tyre, not the finished product.

Terms used here are explained in the RFID glossary, and other named deployments are collected in Case Studies and RFID Readers.

Read more at https://www.chainway.net/Cases/Info/272

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.