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TagMaster, a Swedish manufacturer of RFID solutions for rail and transportation applications, has announced it has received an order for its RFID readers and tags valued at three million Swedish kroner (approximately $1.3 million), from reseller Generale Sistemi.
The RFID equipment will be used to automatically identify rail vehicles on a mainline vehicle condition monitoring system. "In Italy, the technologies and diagnostic systems are very advanced," said Adolfo Deltodesco, the GM of Generale Sistemi division TagItalia, in a prepared statement, "and major companies such as MERMEC, Tecnogamma, Sirti, Ansaldo, Delta Sistemi and others are now heavily engaged in the development of so-called multifunctional train condition monitoring portals."
These portals, Deltodesco explains, are placed along the line to automatically measure bearing temperatures and other essential diagnostic parameters necessary to ensure rail safety. The system is expected to be deployed in early 2010, according to Richard Holt, TagMaster's director of transportation solutions, and will ultimately be employed to identify more than 20,000 train cars.
The order includes the company's LR-6HD interrogator, a 2.45 GHz RFID reader with a read range of up to 6 meters (20 feet), that will be installed alongside railroad tracks, as well as the 145500 HD ID-Tag, a read-only 2.45 GHz heavy-duty RFID tag, for which the tag ID is set to a unique eight-digit number.
The tags will be installed on each car or wagon.
The interrogators, able to read the tags at speeds of more than 300 kilometers per hour (186 miles per hour), will be connected to the condition-monitoring system, with the reader identifying each train car that passes.
The RFID system allows a real-time analysis of the measured conditions to be directly associated with the precise identity of each carriage or wagon examined.
Source: RFID Journal
