RFID labels to play key role in tracking OTR tires

London - The off-the-road (OTR) tire sector will be at the forefront in the adoption of vulcanised RFID barcode bead labels in the tire industry over next few years, believes Jos Uijlenbroek, co-founder of Ferm RFID Solutions, now a division of FineLine Technologies.

OTR is among the most expensive categories of tire and are used in applications where failures carry major financial consequences, Uijlenbroek noted in an article supplied to ERJ ahead of the Tire Technology Expo 2020.

The largest OTR tires can cost up to $100,000, with extra high expense around stocking the many different types needed to meet specific requirements of companies and machinery.

However, according to Uijlenbroek, the greatest costs relate to damage to machinery and loss of production caused by tire failures, especially as OTR applications are often in remote, hard-to-reach locations.

The huge potential impact of these factors on the profitability of end-user operation point to a major role for RFID labels, both in controlling the production processes and the quality of OTR tires.

Integrated RFID label offer significant advantages of alternative tire identification and tracking methodologies, such as vulcanised physical batch numbers on steel identification plates, laser-engraved QR codes, and QR code bead labels, said Uijlenbroek.

Benefits, he said, are seen across the tire manufacturing supply chain and logistics in terms of: cost effectiveness; the amount and level of production information carried; resistance to tire-production and tire-fitting processes; robustness in harsh OTR environments; and removal of the need for line-of-sight reading.

The use of RFID will become “commonplace for tracking individual tires from production to consumer, he concluded.  “This holds true particularly for OTR tires that carry high costs and even higher consequences that necessitate quality production and identification.”

A technical paper by Uijlenbroek on the use of RFID labels for identifying OTR tires can be accessed here.