Fabrication and Evaluation of Carbon-based Flexible RFID Tags on 3D-printed substrates

In this paper, we present flexible passive UHF RFID tag antennas fabricated by 3D dispensing and brush-painting on 3D-printed bendable substrates. A carbon-based stretchable conductor is utilized in antenna fabrication. Our measurement results confirm that tags fabricated using both manufacturing methods achieve great performance: The attainable read ranges of the 3D-dispensed and brush-painted tags are 2.4 and 3.1 meters, respectively. Thus, the established carbon-based tag antennas do not perform in the same high level as common metal-based tag antennas but these preliminary results are very promising, considering the current trend towards more environmentally friendly and cost-effective materials in electronics.