E&CSE Research Seminar, Wednesday 22 - August - 2007

Abstract:

Positioning of RFID tags in a warehouse scenario such as supply chain management system and the working of the same have always been a challenge. Many objects in the warehouse are stacked one over another. They contain significant amounts of conductive materials which makes difficult to identify these objects. The previous tag antenna for pallets was a 3-dimensional folded dipole antenna called an Albano tag. Drawbacks of an Albano tag is that it is sensitive to conductive material and has a limitation of reading when the pallets are placed one over another. We propose a novel dual-planar L-shaped RFID tag antenna. The proposed design operates in the unlicensed frequency bands, has a broad 3-dB beamwidth and minimises back radiation into the pallet/carton. Therefore, the performance of the tag would not degrade in the presence of conductive materials. Currently, a full-wave electromagnetic solver CST Microwave Studio™ is used to fully characterise two different prototypes of the Dual-planar L-shaped antenna: (a) a single patch antenna and (b) a 2-element array. The simulation and measured results have shown promises to the application of RFID in warehouse scenario. Finally we have a plan to develop a hybrid numerical method to design the antenna and characterise the environment with in-house developed numerical codes.

About the Speaker:

Mr. Amit Rawal obtained his B.E. and Masters of Technology in Electronics and Communication from India in 2001 and 2003 respectively. He was the Gold Medalist in his M.Tech. He then worked in a Telecom company based in New Delhi , India for 3 years before joining Monash University to pursue Master of Engineering Science by Research (leading to PhD) in July 2006. He co-authored a paper presented in IEEE International Conferences on Vacuum Electronics (IVEC) and IEEE International Conference on Plasma Science (ICOPS) in May and June 2003 respectively. He has also had few white papers published in International Engineering Consortium (IEC) on various upcoming technologies like IPTV, WiMAX and VPN. In his 1^st year of candidature in Monash University , Amit Rawal has two papers accepted for publication in IEEE conferences (AP-S/URSI 07 in USA and EuMW 07 in Germany ). He has also submitted another paper to IEEE conference ISCIT 07, Sydney and is waiting for review process to be completed.