Patent Application
20090202298
This disclosure concerns a reflective pavement marking that includes raised pellets in a base line that are effective in reflecting light in both dry and wet conditions and the reflectivity is renewable as the surfaces wear away.
It is common in traffic control to use pavement markings for directing vehicles. Typically, solid lines or skip lines are formed on the surface of pavement to guide the drivers of vehicles in safe traffic flow arrangements.
In order to make the pavement striping more visible in darkness, reflective beads have been added to the striping. In wet night time conditions the reflectivity of the road striping is substantially reduced because of the presence of water on the road striping. The water tends to block the light from engaging and being reflected from the beads, making the road conditions hazardous. This hazardous condition may be aggravated because the drivers may be used to having adequate reflection of the headlights for directing the drivers in the proper lanes.
It is known that incorporating vertical surfaces in pavement markings improves the visibility of the marking and the reflex reflectivity of the marking, particularly in wet atmospheric conditions. Regular flat striping is hard to see when wet for several reasons. For example, when 30 meter geometry is applied, where the vehicle lights are 30 meters away from the reflective surface, Schnell's laws of defraction and Fresnell's laws of reflection dictate that about 85% of the light from the headlights is reflected off the surface of the water and does not even reach the reflective striping. Also, of the 15% of the light that is refracted into the water and reflected back, only 28% will be refracted back into the air. If the line was a perfect reflector, only about 4% of the original light would make it back to the eyes of the driver of the vehicle. By incorporating a vertical surface within the line, over 98% of the light is transmitted to the vertical reflecting surface, and 98% of the reflected light refracts back into the air.
The vertical profiles have been achieved by imprinting protrusions in the baseline marking before the base line material has been cured, or by adding the protrusions to the baseline marking before it has cured. Also, reflective protrusions have been developed by coating a core product with adhesive and subsequently dunking the core product in molten glass, or mixing the coated core product in small spherical glass beads. Another example is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 6,326,053 in which protuberances are formed in the base line marking and optical elements are partially embedded in the protuberances.
The beads that are used to reflect light may be translucent and therefore retro-reflective, or the beads may be formed of reflective material. This is effective particularly when the beads are elevated above the pavement surface so that they are not submerged in wet conditions.
The pavement markings can be formed in patterns that have some significance to the vehicle operators, such as different formations of striping and skip lines. The arrangement of the striping in the lane of the vehicle may be formed so that when the wheels roll over the striping the wheels tend to vibrate or “rumble”, or the striping may be formed so as to direct the driver of the vehicle with arrows or other direction symbols.
One of the problems of the prior art elevated reflective striping is that the materials of the striping wear away over time due to environmental conditions and particularly due to engagement by the wheels of vehicles on the striping. The reflective beads tend to become loose and eventually separated from the striping, thereby diminishing the amount of reflection provided by the striping. Even when the reflective beads are partially embedded in the striping, the beads tend to become loose and separate from the striping.
Other markings that have a renewable reflective structure tend to have a period of poor reflectivity between the time when the reflective surface has been damaged or lost and other beads have not yet been properly exposed. And the processes for making the reflective markings as described above are expensive.
Thus, this invention addresses the problems of the prior art described above and provides improved reflective pellets for reflective marking of highways, the process of making the pellets, and highway striping that includes the pellets.
The present invention provides improved road striping for highways over which vehicles pass, including raised reflective pellets that tend to provide better reflection over a longer period of time.
One form of the invention is a process of making reflective pellets for reflective marking of highways, with the process including forming a mixture of molten thermoplastic and reflective beads, the extrusion of the mixture to form an extrudate, dividing the extrudate into lengths to form the plastic extrudate into pellets, each of which contain a plurality of the plastic beads. The pellets may be cooled in liquid until the pellets become solid. The surface of the cured thermoplastic material that forms the body of the pellet may be removed so as to provide more exposure of the beads at the surface of the pellets. This provides the surface beads with enough exposure to reflect light.
Another feature of the invention is that the pellets are formed with microscopic reflective beads, both internally and at the surface thereof, so that wear at the surface of the pellets tends to expose more of the reflective beads. As the beads are lost due to wear on the pellets the beads next under the lost beads will become exposed for continued reflection by the pellets.
Another aspect of the invention includes the process of forming the reflective beads, which includes immersing the pellets in a dissolving liquid that dissolves and removes the thermoplastic material at the surface of the pellets so as to expose the reflective beads.
Another form of the invention includes the process of removing the material at the surface of the pellets to expose the reflective beads at the surface of the pellets, including agitating the pellets in a dissolving liquid.
Another aspect of the invention may be bonding of the pellets to the base line, which includes fusing the thermoplastic material of the pellets to the material of the base line.
Other objects, features and advantages of the present invention will become apparent upon reading the following specification, taken in conjunction with the accompanying drawings.
Referring now in more detail to the drawings, in which like numerals indicate like parts throughout the several views,
The pellets may be manufactured by formulating a thermoplastic with appropriate pigment, a glass or ceramic microsphere loading of 50-75% and a binder system specifically tailored to be soluble in a particular solvent. This provides the pellets with a substantially predetermined bead count and a substantially consistent composition of both the beads and the thermoplastic throughout its body. For example a pellet may be 5 centimeters in diameter and contain approximately 14,158 micro reflective beads. Other amounts of beads may be present in the pellets, depending of the density of the beads in the extrudate from which the pellets are formed, the size of the pellets, the size of the beads, etc. The compound is then extruded and pelletized with equipment common in the plastic industry, into a substantially spherical pellet. This forms the body 20 of the pellets 16. The reflective beads 22 are embedded in the body 20 of the pellets, with the surface beads 24 partially embedded so that a substantial amount of the surfaces of these beads are exposed. Preferably, the reflective beads 22 are microspheres of glass or ceramic that are retroreflective and have a diameter of about 0.015 to 0.06 cm. Reflective beads of other sizes may be used, and a mixture of sizes of beads and of varying refractive indexes of beads may be used. Micro-spherical beads 22 are available from Flex-o-Lite, Inc. of St. Louis, Mo.
The reflective beads 18 that are imbedded in the base line may be the same as or different from the reflective beads 22 that are imbedded in the pellets.
As shown in
The molten mixture of thermoplastic 42 and reflective beads 24 is extruded into a container 44 filled with a cooling liquid 46. A knife 47 moving in a rotary path 49 cuts the oncoming extrudate so that it is divided into equal lengths in an unfinished spherical pellet form 16A as shown in
The cooling liquid, such as water, cools the molten thermoplastic of the pellets so that the thermoplastic becomes solid and hard, with the reflective beads 22 captured internally of the body 20 of the beads.
The now solid, cooled pellets 16A are transferred to an agitator, such as agitator 48 of
After the agitation cycle has been completed, the pellets are removed from the agitator 48, and the thermoplastic body 20 of the pellets will have been reduced in diameter so that the reflective beads 22 at the surface of the body 20 are exposed and protrude from the body, as shown in
Because the pellets are effectively “pre-worn” by the chemicals and agitation, there should be no period of poor reflectivity once placed in service.
Should the external surface of the pellets be deteriorated and worn away, the wearing away of the body 20 exposes the internal beads 26 (
The following are examples of the make up of reflective pellets made in accordance with this invention:
The thermoplastic for the base line is added to a kettle on the truck and heated to approximately 400-425° F. where it becomes molten and acts as a pourable liquid. It is pumped from the kettle to the application gun where it is extruded or sprayed onto the road surface in the form of a line of specified width, typically 6 inches wide, and thickness of approximately 0.1 inch. Immediately behind the application gun is the pellet dispenser 56 and immediately behind the pellet dispenser is the bead dispenser 58 which randomly sprinkles the glass beads 18 onto the surface of the molten plastic where they are partially embedded to varying depths where they become mechanically entrapped upon cooling and solidification of the base line.
The reflective pellets 16 are placed in a hopper 64 that feeds to a rotary pellet dispensing drum 66, shown in
As the pellet dispensing drum rotates in the direction as indicated by arrow 72, air is withdrawn through the vacuum opening 76 above the internal baffle 80 and air is supplied through the pressure opening 78 to move air into the pellet dispensing drum below the internal baffle 80. This has the effect of drawing the reflective pellets 16 that are in the hopper 64 above the pellet dispensing drum 66 into the surface openings 68. The surface openings 68 are sized to be smaller than the reflective pellets 16. This has the effect of causing the reflective pellets 16 to cling to the exterior surface of the pellet dispensing drum at the surface openings 68 as the surface openings 68 pass beneath the hopper 64. As the pellet dispensing drum rotates farther along its circular path, it carries the reflective pellets 16 to the lower portion of the pellet dispensing drum where the higher pressure received from the pressure opening 78 below the internal baffle 80 discharges the reflective pellets onto the base line 14.
As shown in
As shown in
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As shown in
The reflective beads 18 that are distributed on the surface of the base line 14 may be the same or may be different from the reflective beads 22 that are embedded in the pellets 16.
As shown in
For an optimum effect of the road striping, the reflective pellets should be spaced apart between about 3 centimeters and about 6 centimeters along the length of the paved road. Since the reflective pellets 16 protrude higher from the road striping than the reflective beads 18, the greater spacing between the reflective pellets minimizes the amount of shadowing of the reflective beads 18 by the reflective pellets and allows for more light impingement upon the reflective beads 18 distributed between the pellets.
The thermoplastic material from which the body 20 of the reflective pellets 16 are made may be formed of other thermoplastics, including acrylic resin, polyvinyl butyral resin, polycarbonates and poly olefins.
Although preferred embodiments of the invention have been disclosed in detail herein, it will be obvious to those skilled in the art that variations and modifications of the disclosed embodiments can be made without departing from the spirit and scope of the invention as set forth in the following claims.
