High-Temperature Ceramic UHF RFID Tag Steelcode (13 × 38 mm)

A ceramic UHF RFID tag for hot metal tooling

Steelcode is a small bar-shaped UHF tag built around a ceramic body and finished with a glass-fibre reinforced nylon (PA6+GF) surface. It is meant for metal items that go through heat: fixtures on a heat-treatment line, jigs that travel through a paint oven, moulds and dies. It is rated for ambient temperatures from −30 °C to +300 °C and reads up to 6.5 m when mounted on metal.

Fixing it so it stays on

At 13 × 38 mm and 7.7 mm thick, the tag fits the flat edge of most fixtures and tool bodies. Two fixing methods are supported:

• Epoxy: bond it with a high-performance epoxy resin where drilling is not allowed.
• Rivet: fasten it through the 3.4 mm rivet hole for a mechanical fix that does not depend on adhesive.

For assets that see repeated heating and cooling, a rivet is usually the safer choice, and any epoxy used should itself be rated for the process temperature.

Reading and encoding

The Impinj R6-P is an EPC Gen2 UHF chip, so Steelcode can be read and written by any EPC Gen2 reader on India’s 865–868 MHz band, from a handheld reader at the tool crib to a fixed reader at a line station. Place read points outside the hot zone, where the reader and antenna are safe too. Smaller and differently shaped heat-tolerant tags are listed under RFID PCB and ceramic tags.