GM Using Smart Bolts on Gen 5 Engines
1/23/2014 8:48:00 AM
FEATURE
General Motors “temporarily installs a bolt with an embedded passive RFID tag on every cylinder head and engine block that GM uses to make its Gen 5 six- and eight-cylinder engines, in order to track the assembly process and verify that the procedures are being carried out,” RFiD Journal reports.
Each engine block and cylinder head comes with a 13.56 MHz RFID-enabled bolt compliant with the ISO 15693 standard, writes Claire Swedberg of the Journal.
GM has been using RFID technology for engine assembly for more than a decade at its factory in Tonawanda, NY, plant manufacturing engineering superintendent Mark Chiappetta told the Journal.
“The company has been applying a passive 13.56 MHz Siemens Simatic RF340T tag, containing 8 kilobytes of memory, to every pallet on which engines are loaded, enabling the collection of data regarding each engine’s assembly,” writes Swedberg.
For help with its manufacturing process, GM turned to Balluff, which offers an RFID tag in the form of a customized screw-in bolt.
“The resulting bolt tag employs a proprietary thread type to fit the proper hole size, and includes a Balluff BIS M-series 13.56 MHz tag built into a recess in the bolt’s head, held in place by epoxy,” Swedberg writes. “The bolt is inserted into one of a block’s or cylinder head’s existing holes that will later be used to secure it to an engine with another bolt in engine assembly.”
To read RFiD’s article, click here.
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