Reflective film products were successfully developed by the US 3M company. Up to now, only a few countries such as the United States, Japan, China, and South Korea can produce them. Reflective films have been used in developed countries for a long time, with excellent optical properties and excellent society. Economic value has been widely recognized and accepted. Similarly, this has also attracted the full attention of many scientific and technological workers in the optical industry and traffic safety field in my country.
As early as 1950, Dr. Dong Qifang, a Chinese American scientist, developed directional glass beads, and subsequently developed a series of reflective materials such as reflective cloth. In 1968, the American ROWLAND brothers invented and registered microprism retroreflective technology.
In the 1970s, Mr. Yang Yonggang from the Optics Department of the Chinese Academy of Metrology introduced the structural principles, optical characteristics, performance testing and other technical literature of the performance of the retroreflective film to the country. Subsequently, many scientific research institutes, colleges and universities have successively invested in the series of reflective film products. Research and development. For example, scientific research units such as the Institute of Highway Science of the Ministry of Communications and the Institute of Optics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences have organized experts and special funds to set up research teams and conduct research projects.
These early experts and researchers put a lot of effort on reflective materials and achieved certain phased results. They basically figured out the basic production process principles of reflective materials. However, under the conditions at that time, due to the foundation of chemical engineering The weakness of the industry, special coatings, glass beads and other raw materials cannot be solved, and there is no stereotyped production equipment, which limits the industrialization of reflective materials under certain conditions.
Until the 1980s, Zhejiang Taizhou Reflective Materials Co., Ltd. began to develop high-refractive index glass beads, gradually solving the most important raw material for the development of reflective films, laying the foundation for the localization of reflective materials in my country.
After that, in the 1990s, domestic micro-bead transparent reflective materials made great progress, and successively developed advertising-grade reflective films, engineering-grade reflective films, high-strength reflective films, and other reflective materials with embedded microbeads, and reflective fabrics. Reflective leather, reflective fuse, and reflective thermal film have also been launched. By the end of the 1990s, glass bead products were basically mature in my country, and some relatively large-scale enterprises have also formed in this industry.
However, another type of reflective material, namely the reflective material of microprisms, is still in its infancy in my country. It was not until the beginning of the 21st century that a few shoe material companies in Jinjiang, Fujian, were developing it during mismatches. After several years of evolution, although the quality of the product has been improved, it still stays in the most primitive mode of production. The intermittent mode of production. The manufacturers of such products in the world basically On the implementation of continuous production.
Another is that the core technology is the research and development of the original mold, which is basically in a blank state. Although not much progress has been made in the development of core technology, several manufacturers have successively launched a new form of product-reflective inkjet cloth. The introduction of reflective inkjet cloth has opened up a new market for reflective materials-the advertising market.
