Tracking Radioactive Isotopes

We were hired to help implement an RFID tracking system at a pharmaceutical company that used radioactive isotopes to create new chemical compounds used in basic research. Accurately tracking these dangerous materials was critical.

The radioactive materials travelled through their facility in containers that they called pigs:

You’ll notice that the container on the left has a lead lining and is used to contain gamma radiation. The other isotopes used the plastic pig.

All of the pigs has a small amount of alcohol in them to contain the material and they were moved from one freezer to another in containers of dry ice.

We uses a 1 by 2 inch polyester label with an Avery 700048 RFID inlay for this application. We preprinted these labels with sequential numbers printed in human readable, Data Matrix, and RFID. The customer applied these labels to the pigs when they dispatched materials to researchers.

Our first concern was reading the RFID labels at cold temperatures. We put the pigs in dry ice for three and a half hours and they were still readable, although the read range was lessened.

We installed Intermec IF2 fixed RFID readers and two antennas at strategic doors around the facility to track movements and used a CN70E hand held computer to track deliveries to their final destination.

One odd result of our testing was that we could read an RFID tag that was on a lead lined pig even when the tag was on the opposite side from the antenna. It must have been some kind of surface wave.

A difficult RFID project solved.