How does reflective material works?

Reflective materials are applied in our surroundings, you can see reflective material from the highway signs, road signs, construction zone, and construction work clothing, traffic police clothing, even display on the bike, truck body, graphic on the garment, helmet or shoes. They are very eye-catching, have high brightness at night, but how does it work? 

The principle of reflective material is to collect the surrounding light by multi retro reflection, then reflect all collected light into the same direction with original lighting by stronger lighting form than before, to achieve the high visibility of the reflective material.

In order to achieve the whole reflective effect, the miro glass beads are used on the surface of reflective material, to finish the multi retro reflection. 

The basic principle of reflection

Miro glass beads

When miro glass beads are coated on the surface, and more than half of beads are inserted into the kinds of backing material like below, thus when the lighting emissions into miro glass beads, the light will reflect when meet the reflector coating, and reflected lighting will come out by the transparent beads which is out of the reflector layer.

• Minute transparent spheres
• Transparent binder layer containing transparent color film coating
• Transparent color film containing transparent color pigment
• Reflector coating containing metallic flake pigment
• Moldable cushion layer containing metallic flake pigment
• Back size coating
• Removable carrier sheet

Micro prisms

From the above reflection of glass bead, we can know the glass bead is a good material for reflective material, but the reflective effect of micro prisms is better than that of glass beads, this is diamond grade reflective material. 

The below pic is the basics of the reflective effect by micro prisms.