Do pedestrians need – and all of us, even avid drivers, sometimes come out in their role to wear clothes with reflective materials so that they don’t accidentally knock you off in the dark? What kind of reflective clothing to choose? How to wear it? To whom it will help more: a child or an adult?
For children under the age of seven, the choice of reflective clothing is not bad. But to buy it for schoolchildren and adults is a problem. Retro-reflective vests or flicker bracelets can be found easily. There are bags for removable shoes and school backpacks with reflective stripes.
They put the car on a fixed point for shooting the light beams of the headlights, placed the marking cones (it is easy to determine the pedestrian’s visibility distance), turned on the dipped beam – and first found the distance at which the student in dark clothes was no longer visible in the beams of Kalinovsky headlights: 160 meters. By the way, this is not bad: the headlight of the Lada beats powerfully.
And now we will put something reflective on adults and children.
The jacket on the adult shone in the headlights like a searchlight, but the stripes on the children’s down jacket “smoldered” barely.
The dim light reflected and decorations on the bag with a backpack. Although there is a much more important nuance with them: you can easily become invisible if you turn sideways to the car when crossing the road or meet it, leaving the backpack and bag behind your back.
The same applies to the reflective bracelet (flicker). From the headlights, it can be shielded in two accounts. Therefore, if you already wear flickers, it is better in pairs: one on the right hand, the second – on the left.
And the most effective vest. Like the jacket, embroidered with bright reflectors: they are visible from any angle!
But do light reflectors help increase visibility? How much will the driver have more headroom in terms of distance, and therefore also time to notice pedestrians in time and slow down? The bag with glitter disappeared in the dark already 180 meters from the car – it will help you to “win” just 20 meters. A backpack with a patch disappeared in the darkness at 240 meters. The bracelets on their hands stopped returning the light in three hundred meters. The driver stopped distinguishing the vest on the child 320 meters away. And further, all managed to get away an adult in a fashionable jacket, embroidered with reflective stripes – 368 meters!
In other words, the right reflective clothing allows you to more than double the distance at which a pedestrian is visible. But at the speed of 90 km / h, the “extra” 160-200 meters are a few seconds that the driver will have in reserve.
It is interesting that when adults wear the same flickers and vests instead of children, the distance of visibility increased by 15-20 meters. And if you remove the reflective bracelets from your hands and put them on your feet, the recognition distance is reduced by 80 meters. That is, the higher the light reflector is, the more noticeable it is! That is why jackets and hats with “luminous” stripes are much more effective, for example, trousers or shoes.
And clothes with reflectors are more effective than flickers – after all, fixed elements are more reliable than removable ones: ordinary flickers break, are forgotten, and are lost. The clothes are impossible to forget or lose: if you don’t dress, you will freeze.
Reflective elements of clothing work on a slightly different principle than the well-known reflectors, that is retro-reflective “mirror” traps.
The first principle: a fluorescent paint is applied to the fabric with the addition of phosphor: a substance capable of converting the energy (primarily light) absorbed by it into light radiation. And the second – on the fabric they glue or sew a reflective film with a special layer of translucent polymer with the inclusion of glass microspheres. Its ability to directional reflection is due to both the intense accumulation of light by the microspheres and the mirror-lens effect, resulting from the special surface treatment of the microspheres. And to increase the intensity of reflection of light under the microspheres enclosed “mirror” reflective layer.