APPLICATION OF NEAR FIELD TECHNOLOGY IN HEAVY COMMERCIAL VEHICLE TIRE MONITORING SYSTEM

The thesis proposes a near-field Communication (NF) based solution, for the tire pressure monitoring system (TPMS) in heavy commercial vehicles, as an alternative to wireless far-field (FF) based communication used in conventional TPMS.
Truck and tire manufacturers have stepped up efforts to develop TPMS solutions, as recent EU regulations will soon make TPMS mandatory in heavy commercial vehicles, but the dense metal content in this application environment attenuates the wireless communication and hinders the development of efficient and robust TPMS solutions.
The thesis covers many practical aspects and includes an extensive literature review on the state-of-the-art TPMS solutions commercially available for heavy commercial vehicles. A second literature review was conducted on NF communication and its automotive applications. The researcher then conducted a finite element analysis (FEA) to simulate the application environment, represented by the tire and wheel combination, in order to evaluate the conventional TPMS signal propagation and the proposed system signal propagation. The simulations demonstrated the adverse effect of the application environment on the signal propagation of conventional TPMS and showed the merit of using NF-based communication. The proposed transmitter design was built and evaluated on an actual truck wheel and tire combination in a series of laboratory tests. The proposed transmitter unit was detected with sufficiently high signal-to-noise to establish a communication channel in the presence of limited metal objects in close proximity in laboratory conditions, which could allow for a more advance commercial vehicle TPMS. This industry driven project addresses a serious traffic safety issue and forms a proof-of-concept for the development of a complete TPMS solution.