Applications

Revolutionizing industrial maintenance

Tego high-memory tagging technology is being used to transform full life-cycle asset management and maintenance in many industries:

• Flyable parts in aviation;
• Remote assets in renewable energy;
• Valves and maintainable items in process industries;
• Manufacturing equipment at CPG plants;
• Trains and other transportation assets;
• Hazmat material in the nuclear industry.

Studies have found many examples where only 20% of a technician’s time involved productive work. 80% of repair time was spent gathering information and tracking parts and tools to set up the job.

Similarly, lifed assets or assets requiring periodic maintenance are regularly either taken out of service prematurely (reducing their economic life) or miss key maintenance events, creating potentially hazardous situations and exposing organizations to liability issues.

In some industries, extensive record keeping is a legislative requirement, and compliance costs can be very high because of the time required to record the data.

Tego solutions are designed to address these and other problems, and offer the genuine prospect of revolutionizing industrial maintenance and asset management with patented, breakthrough technology.

Proven, leading-edge technology solutions

Tego technology has been designed to provide automated capture and delivery of information both in terms of functionality and the environments in which it can operate. As a result, it provides several key - and previously not possible - features:

• High-memory capacity that holds the entire life history of an asset;
• Memory retention as long as the life of an asset;
• Ability to survive in the harshest environments;
• Compatibility with existing Gen 2 UHF RFID equipment;
• Standards based interoperability across organizations.

High memory capacity

Unlike many retail applications, where a license plate can be used to pull information out of a central retailer database, the reality of industrial maintenance is that this is rarely viable. In these cases, a far better approach is to store information on a high-memory tag that is attached to assets, and then optionally, to synchronize with a database periodically. There are a number of reasons for this:

• Many industrial assets are located at remote locations where network connectivity is either cost prohibitive or not available;
• The manufacturer, end user and maintainer have different database systems, requiring a huge integration activity — and some or all of the organizations both cooperate and compete with each other, making widespread data sharing impossible;
• Information is most needed when networks are likely to be impaired, e.g. following an incident such as an accident or natural disaster;
• Data shared with other organizations needs to be limited for reasons of competition, secrecy or potential liability.

Tego technology thus delivers the "dream" scenario of always having information available with the part, but without requiring expensive network or integration projects, and without any risk of "leaks" when data is shared across organizations.

Memory life as long as the asset

Conventional RFID chips are typically designed for one short trip through the retail supply chain, where memory life is not an issue. As a result, information is held in the form of a charge, which dissipates over time, especially if exposed to higher temperatures. As a result, the use of such memory in embedded or remote applications is open to considerable doubt, and its users must consider the very real possibility in the future of some form of field maintenance event on the tags as well as the tagged assets!

In contrast, Tego chips were designed from the outset to survive the harsh aviation environment, where assets are in service for many decades, and where parts can be exposed to extreme temperatures. As a result, Tego accelerated life models predict a memory retention life in excess of one hundred years, and extensive testing under high temperatures has not identified any bit errors from aging effects. Indeed Tego technology is one of only a very few solutions capable of withstanding memory corruption from gamma radiation - and is believed to be the only solution to do so with six-sigma levels of data integrity.

Rapid deployment

For end users considering adoption, a launch kit is available and can be used for both familiarization and deployment purposes. Using the kits, many customers have been able to start encoding tags and reading data within a couple of hours. Other products available include:

• Rugged high-memory tags
• Deployment software for hand-held or fixed readers

High memory chips are available to tag manufacturers and to aviation equipment suppliers considering an embedded implementation, for example on circuit boards.

Tego also welcomes enquiries from prospective integrators and software partners considering moving into the space, whether proactively or in support of a customer.