How Does Reflective Clothing Work

Glass bead reflective surfaces use glass spheres to collect light and bounce it back to the source.

How does reflective clothing work. How reflective clothing works posted on march 3 2014 march 2 2014 by gaz reflective clothing makes up part of high visibility clothing the other half being a fluorescent material that reacts with uv light and emits it back out in the visible spectrum so the clothing appears brighter. Being in the business of reflection it didn t take much reflection of our own to realize it would probably be helpful if we put together a little post about how reflective clothing actually works of course we re pretty fascinated with the simple principle of retro reflectivity and interested in the subject but and hope that we can break it down in a simple manner and pass on this. With more than 35 different products including many high performance options 3m scotchlite reflective material offers one of the largest and most. Weallight are reflective fabric manufacturer.

The rounded shape of the beads is what creates the retro reflectivity. Fabric is coated with special silvered inks. When a light. The light from a drivers headlights will go straight back to the driver who will see the reflective materials really well.

Then prisms or beads are applied on top of these inks. Reflective clothing uses retroreflection to provide high visibility at night. The diagram below shows how the glass beads or prisms do this. Shedding light on reflective technology 3m is a pioneer in developing the science behind retroreflection and has been advancing the technology in new and groundbreaking ways for over 70 years.

However special reflective materials work much better. They work like the glass beads but are more efficient thus creating a brighter return of light. Actually there must be a distribution of particle size in glass beads because it was regarded as a kind of particulate powder and uniform size of the particle could not exist. Therefore size distribution analysis of glass beads was essential.

They are called retro reflective because they are designed to bounce most of the light back to its source instead of scattering it.