Radio frequency identification tag design for automated data acquisition

Automated data acquisition has become a major part of the military's prognostics and diagnostics program as they move towards a condition based maintenance approach for logistics and mission readiness. The desire to apply this approach to a majority of new and legacy platforms has led to the development of a prototype radio frequency identification (RFID) tag with both serial and wireless communications capabilities that can be easily configured to different mechanical and electrical systems. This paper addresses the command architecture used for inter-node communication within the data acquisition network, and verifies the RFID's data collection capabilities by obtaining vibration signatures from bearings running on a machinery fault simulator. The vibration signatures from the RFID are compared to those obtained from a proven data acquisition method.