Embedded Passive RF Tags towards Intrinsically Locatable Buried Plastic Materials

Under Development

University of Colorado Denver More »

Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA)

Damage Prevention and Mitigation -- Pipe Locating

This project developed a low-cost, small thin-film sensor using passive Radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags which use electromagnetic fields to automatically identify and track stored information. Passive tags collect energy from a nearby RFID reader's radio waves. The RF tags can directly be embedded in plastic pipes to detect the pipes buried in soils. The tags will be able to withstand high temperature processing of plastics and stress involved with horizontal tunneling/drilling of buried pipes.

The embedded RF tags will have the capability to locate buried plastic pipes and have integrated sensing functionality, which can measure the strain-stress changes in the plastic materials. The vast amount of acquired sensing data from individual tags may be integrated to an advanced signal processing for better data categorization and mining.

Increased Safety - Accurate and reliable locating by identifying and characterizing the buried plastic pipes from the ground surface is critical and imperative for damage prevention.

https://primis.phmsa.dot.gov/matrix/PrjHome.rdm?prj=628