Glass Beads Play a Crucial Role in Reflectivity of Road Markings

Road markings can help provide information that cannot be clearly known by people from mounted signs while driving. That’s one of the reasons that road markings have a great impact on road safety and optimizing the use of road space.

The effectiveness of road markings mainly depends on whether they can offer clear visibility of markings so that improve the safety of road for users. This is the most vital point especially when there is low light, such as during fog, rain, or night time. When it comes to ensure traffic safety, the visibility of road markings always being a critical factor, consequently rigorous performance requirements have been introduced in many countries like checking and maintaining the condition of roads regularly so as to guarantee the efficacy of road markings. For example, European Reflectivity standards (European Standard EN 1436) specify the minimum levels of daytime and night-time visibility and also color and skid resistance. There are a wide variety of formats for road markings to take effect, including spray, thermoplastic, screed and extrusion, but all have to fulfill stringent visibility requirements.

According to the test of European government, retro-reflection is increased by the addition of glass beads, thereby enhancing the night-time visibility of road markings. The headlight beam will hit the pigmented road marking and be reflected back towards the driver of the car after it enters the glass beads. The test result displays that the road markings, which include high-performance glass beads, are five times brighter than road markings that do not. There is without any doubt that road markings are an indispensable safety feature. In the meanwhile，glass beads considerably increase the reflectivity of paints on the road, which in turn, considerably enhances their visibility and thus improves the safety of both drivers and pedestrians.

Normally，the refractive index of glass beads used in road markings ranges between 1.5 and 1.9. They are developed in a wide range of sizes from 100 to 1500 microns in diameter and with different degrees of roundness. During production, glass beads can be combined into the road marking material; can be added when the road marking is applied; or can be applied to the surface of newly applied road markings before they have set.

During production, glass beads can be combined into the road marking material (intermix beads); can be added when the road marking is applied (injection beads); or can be applied to the surface of newly applied road markings before they have set (drop-on beads).

TORY, a global leader in high-quality precision glass technology, manufactures glass spheres for a variety of applications. TORY provides high-quality glass beads, which can be customized to meet the specific requirements of customers and projects. TORY manufactures glass beads that are suitable for improving the visibility of road markings to tight specifications that ensure optimum reflectivity.

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