A Brief History of the Development of Reflective Materials

Reflective film products were first developed by 3M Company in the United States, and currently only a few countries such as the United States, Japan, China, and South Korea can produce them. Reflective film has been widely used in developed countries for a long time, and its excellent optical properties and outstanding socio-economic value have been widely recognized and accepted. Similarly, this has also attracted the full attention of many scientific and technological workers in the fields of optics and traffic safety in China.
As early as 1950, Dr. Dong Qifang, a Chinese American scientist, developed directional glass microspheres and subsequently developed a series of reflective materials such as reflective cloth. In 1968, the ROWLAND brothers in the United States invented and registered microprism retroreflection technology.
In the 1970s, Professor Yang Yonggang from the Optics Department of the Chinese Academy of Metrology introduced technical literature on the structural principles, optical characteristics, and performance testing of directional reflective films to China. Subsequently, many research institutes and colleges successively invested in the research and development of reflective film series products. For example, the Research Institute of Highway Science of the Ministry of Communications, the Institute of Optics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and other scientific research institutions have organized experts and special funds, set up a research team, and carried out project research. These early experts and researchers devoted a lot of effort to reflective materials and achieved certain phased results, basically exploring the basic production process principles of reflective materials. However, under the conditions at that time, due to the weakness of basic industries such as chemical engineering, specialized raw materials such as coatings and glass microspheres could not be solved, and there was no standardized production equipment, which limited the industrialization process of reflective materials to a certain extent.
Until the 1980s, Zhejiang Taizhou Reflective Material Company began to develop high refractive index glass microspheres, gradually solving the most important raw material for developing reflective films and laying the foundation for the localization of reflective materials in China. In the 1990s, significant progress was made in the development of micro bead reflective materials in China. Advertising grade reflective films, engineering grade reflective films, high-strength reflective films, and other micro bead embedded reflective materials were successively developed. At the same time, reflective fabrics, reflective leather, reflective fuses, and reflective heat stickers were also introduced. By the end of the 1990s, glass micro bead products had basically matured in China, and some relatively large-scale enterprises had also formed in this industry.
However, another type of reflective material, namely microprism, is still in its infancy in China. It was not until around the beginning of the 21st century that several shoe material companies in Jinjiang, Fujian, accidentally developed the civilian product reflective lattice sheet with microprism. After several years of evolution, although the quality of the product has improved, it still remains in the most primitive production mode of intermittent production. Manufacturers of such products in the world basically implement continuous production. Another aspect is that the core technology is the research and development of primitive molds, which is basically in a blank state. Although there hasn’t been much progress in core technology development, several manufacturers have launched a new form of product – reflective printing cloth. The launch of reflective printing cloth has opened up a new market for reflective materials – the advertising market.