Research Projects

The advancement of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) techniques has led to the shift towards intelligent food packaging. Traditional packaging is primarily used for protection, convenience, and containment of food products, while barcodes provide pre-registered details but fail to monitor real-time freshness and quality. RFID technology, similar to Radio Detection and Ranging (RADAR), consists of an interrogator/reader and tag, with the reader acting as a transmitter and receiver of electromagnetic signals. In intelligent food packaging, an RFID sensor tag is required to monitor changes in humidity, moisture, temperature, and pH levels of a packaged food product. However, major issues with RFID technology include uneconomical sensor tags, non-biodegradable packaging materials, and multi-path interference in real scattering environments. To address these issues, compact, chipless, passive, eco-friendly, orientation-independent RFID sensor tags can be developed. The proposed RFID sensor tag includes higher-order identification bits to uniquely identify the food package and metallic ink-based humidity, moisture, temperature, and pH sensors to determine the freshness of food products and the quality of their packaging environment. A broadband reader antenna is required to accurately capture the response of every ID bit and sensor. A dedicated compact, high gain broadband antenna will be developed for the proposed RFID system. The successful design and development of the proposed RFID sensor tag and reader antenna would be advantageous to smart agriculture and food packaging industries, and research scholars can establish startups based on the results of the proposed research work.