Abstract: A roofing granule includes a core and a coating on the core. The coating comprises at least 10 wt. % of a cristobalite component, titanium dioxide, clay, and a hardener. A weight ratio of the amount of cristobalite component to the amount of titanium dioxide in the coating is from about 1:1 to about 5:1. Accordingly, the roofing granule exhibits an improvement in L* value of at least 6% as compared to an L* value of the core alone and/or an improvement in solar reflectivity of at least 5% as compared to a solar reflectivity of the core alone.

Abstract: Aspects and features of this disclosure use an RFID tag or other transponder embedded in an RFID antenna to provide a smart RFID antenna. The smart antenna can have a unique identity, at least in its system environment, and the identity can be readable by the RFID reader through a large insertion loss, providing the reader with the capability to accurately detect the antenna. A method of detecting a smart RFID antenna includes applying a transmit signal at a configured power level, and selectively increasing the configured power level of the transmit signal until detection. In some examples, the process also includes storing location and other useful information for the RFID antenna. In some examples, any or all of this location or other information can be written to a memory in the RFID antenna in addition to a database in the system.

Abstract: An industrial internet of things (IoT) gateway is communicatively coupled to (a) fluid condition sensor(s) monitoring (an) operating parameter(s) of fluid power system fluid, via a programmable logic controller (PLC) data communications protocol interface. The IoT gateway includes a PLC data communications protocol interface master function, a cloud computing interface module and program instructions to periodically sample fluid condition sensor readings, format the readings, and send the readings to a cloud computing message queuing telemetry transport broker for processing by a cloud monitoring system. Machine learning provides predictions of fluid quality and buildup of varnish in the fluid system, applies a scoring algorithm to predict fluid system failure. These predictions may be used to automatically create (a) work ticket(s) related to the fluid system.

Abstract: Aspects and features of this disclosure use an RFID tag or other transponder embedded in an RFID antenna to provide a smart RFID antenna. The smart antenna can have a unique identity, at least in its system environment, and the identity can be readable by the RFID reader through a large insertion loss, providing the reader with the capability to accurately detect the antenna. A method of detecting a smart RFID antenna includes applying a transmit signal at a configured power level, and selectively increasing the configured power level of the transmit signal until detection. In some examples, the process also includes storing location and other useful information for the RFID antenna. In some examples, any or all of this location or other information can be written to a memory in the RFID antenna in addition to a database in the system.