SBIR-STTR Award

Tracking dynamic components of rotorcraft is crucial to component life assessment and overall fleet management. The Navy is pursuing an effort to collect the component information directly off the aircraft through the use of passive RFID (pRFID) tags and a novel reader/gateway system to communicate with the ground station. Finding an optimum pRFID tag/antenna reader system arrangement without a computer model would require numerous time consuming and labor intensive trial-and-error measurements, involving different positions of reader antenna and tag configurations, which can vary significantly with only a slight change in the relative location, position or orientation of the antenna. A physics-based computational method for pRFID system design is proposed to develop an innovative, simple-to-use, low cost and computationally efficient tool that can maximize the performance and reliability of the onboard pRFID tag/reader antenna system used to track rotorcraft dynamic components in an enclosed multipath metallic rotorcraft environment. During this project, Applied EM proposes to develop the computational tool that is customized for pRFID systems on rotorcraft with a state of the art Graphical User Interface (GUI).

Benefit:
With the explosive growth of pRFID-based industry, fast, efficient and accurate pRFID performance prediction tools are of vital importance for a wide variety of applications. The success of this project will most certainly spearhead research and development on employing similar computational concepts for fast, efficient and accurate prediction tools for complex metallic environments.

Keywords:
Signals, Signals, Multipath, Computational Electromagnetics, RFID, Antenna, pRFID