UHF RFID system for the predictive maintenance of a filter press: A real use case

Within the Industry 4.0 context, UHF-RFID-based sensing architectures promise to fill the gap between the physical and digital world, enabling the pervasive measurement of sensing parameters from wireless and battery-less transponders distributed over critical part of machines or embedded in the produced goods. This paper presents the design, the implementation and the commissioning of a complete RFID system aimed at the predictive maintenance of filter-press machinery. The proposed solution includes more than 150 temperature sensors properly positioned on the inflating hoses of the press and interrogated from a network of multiple antenna arrays. The RFID perception layer streams the data via OPC-UA toward the SCADA layer where a cloud-based tool processes the signals at run time to detect anomalies and produces statistics.