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.

Keywords

• downhole oil well
• RFID reader
• half duplex
• sparse solenoid antenna