How Does Retro Reflective Tape Work?

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Reflective tape is something we see and benefit from every night. It works by bouncing light only back to the source of that light, hence making it brighter than surrounding objects. This video explains how retro reflective tape does this. For any questions, please feel free to contact me. Also, for more information, you can go to www.reflectivestore.com .

Retro-reflective tapes reflect by receiving light, bending it, and bouncing it back to the source, and only the source. The bending of light is known as the science of refraction, something we will discuss in an other video. Glass beads were the original method of accomplishing this, and later, in the nineteen sixties, prisms began to be used. Glass beads and prisms function in similar ways, but with prisms being much more efficient and much brighter.

As previously mentioned, glass bead reflective tape was the original invention and reflects using perfectly round glass spheres embedded into a film that bends light as it enters, reflects it off the back of the bead, and then bends it as it exits. The result is light that is traveling in the exact opposite direction that it came in at. Think of glass beads as microscopic parabolic mirrors that return light.

Prism or Prismatic reflective tapes were invented in the nineteen sixties, and reflect using very small angled mirrors that are embossed into a polyester or acrylic film. Light enters the prism array, is bounced once, then twice, and then back to the source. Think of prismatic arrays as microscopic racquet ball courts where the ball bounces in a corner and returns.