A reliability study of coating materials for brush-painted washable textile RFID tags

摘要

This paper presents a washing reliability study of passive UHF RFID textile tags with three different coating materials. The tag antennas were fabricated by brush-painting silver ink on a 100 % cotton fabric. After attaching the ICs, the ready RFID tags were fully coated with three different protective coating materials: regular textile glue, epoxy coating, and silicone rubber. The coated tags were washed 15 times in a household washing machine and tested wirelessly after each washing cycle. Before washing, all tags exhibited good performance and attainable read ranges of about 10 meters, under the European RFID emission regulation. Based on the reliability test and the measurements, all three protective coating materials can successfully protect the RFID tags from the effects of washing, and especially the textile glue was found to be suitable coating for the brush-painted tags.