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Spanish organic strawberry grower Bionest uses a set of RFID solutions to check strawberry temperature fluctuations in processing plants and during transportation, and to monitor strawberry temperature in a retail distribution center in Germany in real time.
It is difficult to achieve transparency of temperature fluctuations during transportation of fresh food, which leads to food damage (the most suitable storage temperature for strawberries is 2-4 degrees Celsius). Food suppliers and retailers have to accept the fact that a large part of the time from when food is shipped to store shelves cannot be sold due to quality problems.
For this reason, Bionest seeks to solve the “temperature problem during transportation,” said Thomas Cera, Bionest’s sales manager. During the Spanish strawberry season (February-May) in 2009, Bionest tried this technology on a small batch of goods and plans to officially use the RFID system in the 2010 strawberry season. The Dutch RFID company Ambient provides application solutions.
The incubator hopes to improve the monitoring of temperature fluctuations and discover temperature problems in time. In addition to saving those products whose temperature is close to the limit, Bionest also hopes to confirm where the temperature problem occurs.
Bionest puts the Ambient SmartPoint label on the top of the fruit tray
Bionest usually puts strawberry pallets on pallets and ships them on the same day they are picked. During the test, the pallets were tracked from the Seville cultivation site in southern Spain to a distribution center in Cologne, Germany. Several batches of cargo pallets are labeled every week to achieve full tracking of transportation. Before the pallet is placed on the truck, Bionest puts the Ambient SmartPoint label on the top of the fruit tray, and the tray goes through a pre-cooling process before being shipped out.
Ambient’s 3000 series products are based on the IEEE 802.15.4 standard. Each SmartPoint tag contains a 2.4 GHz RFID chip, antenna and battery, and a temperature sensor that meets the EN-12830 standard (the European food supply chain temperature recording equipment standard). Both Ambient and ZigBee systems are based on the IEEE 802.15.4 standard, so they have some common characteristics (such as the operating frequency of the two are 2.4 GHz, and the data rate of 250 kilobytes per second), but there are also differences between the two, for example For example, SmartPoint tags use RSSI (Received Signal Strength Indication) and other technologies to calculate their respective positions, which can determine the network location (three-dimensional coordinates) of the tags.
SmartPoint tags communicate with Ambient’s wireless mesh network. The mesh network includes other SmartPoint tags and Ambient MicroRouters. The latter receives the tag’s signal, transmits the tag’s data and its location to a gateway reader, and the reader transmits the information to a gateway reader. Back-end server.
In the Bionest application, MicroRouters receive temperature data and the unique ID code of each sensor every 15 minutes, and then wirelessly send this information to the gateway. “In the pilot project,” said Eelco de Jong, Head of Marketing and Business Development at Ambient, “We have installed small wireless mesh networks in the distribution centers of Spanish Bionest and German retailers. In Bionest, the gateway uses a wired Internet connection to send the ID code of the tag. And temperature data, the time and date of temperature reading, to the Ambient software running on the Bionest back-end server, that is, the cold chain monitor.
When strawberries are loaded onto the truck, the reader network no longer reads sensor data. Since the SmartPoint tag contains 1 megabyte of memory, the tag can continue to read the temperature every 15 minutes and store the data generated during transportation for two days. When arriving at the retailer’s distribution center, Ambient MicroRouters reads the temperature record of each tag and sends the data to a single gateway, which uses a GPRS connection to transmit the information to the cold chain monitor software.
The cold chain monitor compiles the data and allows Bionest and other authorized users to obtain this information through the network software. “It is very important for data from two independent networks in different countries to be integrated into the same database,” de Jong said.
In addition, de Jong said, SmartPoint tags use a set of on-shelf arithmetic developed jointly by researchers at Ambient and Bremen University. Arithmetic is based on the measurement of time and temperature. He said that different types of fruits and vegetables have different algorithms. When the SmartPoint tag arrives in Germany, it will give a prompt, such as “3.4 days remaining in shelf life”.
According to Ambient, the MicroRouter can read SmartPoint tags up to 25 meters indoors and up to 50 meters outdoors. MicroRouter can transmit data to gateways 50-100 meters away.
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