Long-form writing from the LIFO Technologies engineering team — embedded systems, AI & computer vision, and the industrial deployments behind them.
Industrial gas cylinder losses are the gap between gas produced or received in bulk and the net gas dispatched in filled cylinders, along…
RFID in cylinder tracking sounds like the obvious upgrade until you put it inside a working gas plant. Tags struggle on steel, they do not sit well on a curved cylinder, and they rarely survive blasting, repainting and testing. The "anti-metal" tag every vendor recommends fixes the signal problem and leaves the durability problem exactly where it was.
The gas industry loses 10–40% of cylinders every year, per World Liquid Gas Association figures, and most of that loss goes unmeasured.…
This is why CATalytics is built around QR rather than RFID. A printed or etched code does not lose signal as it ages, and if a sticker ever wears, replacing it costs almost nothing. For cylinders that live for decades in rough conditions, a durable QR code gives you the same asset-level visibility, demurrage billing and test-date tracking the software provides, without the read-degradation and hardware overhead RFID brings to a cylinder fleet.
