Design of a Novel RFID Reader for Oilwell Downhole Applications

Abstract

RFID (Radio Frequency Identification), which transmits control data through electronic tags in a non-contact manner, provides a new approach for efficient and low-cost remote control of oil downhole tools. However, the interference of harsh downhole environments and the high-speed movement of tags seriously affect the performance of the current downhole reader. To effectively address this issue, in this study, a novel downhole RFID reader is presented. By introducing the half-duplex communication protocol to replace the current full-duplex communication protocol in the hardware circuits of the reader, its tag recognition ability can be improved. Then, the corresponding hardware circuits and software programs are designed. Furthermore, a sparse solenoid antenna is adopted to replace the traditional tightly wound solenoid antenna, which can provide a longer reading area range to cope with the high-moving tag, and its total length and spacing parameters between adjacent coils are designed in detail. The test results show that the proposed RFID reader based on a half-duplex communication protocol can communicate with tags normally, and its sparse solenoid antenna provides significantly more tag reading times than traditional tightly wound solenoid antennas under the same antenna inductance.