Development on model of the retro-reflection by glass beads used in traffic road delineator.
Development on model of the retro-reflection by glass beads used in traffic road delineator.


Thomas Grosges
Laboratoire d'Optique appliquée
Université Catholique de Louvain
Chemin du cyclotron , 2
B-1348 Louvain-La-Neuve
Belgium




Abstract




During the nocturnal driving, the visibility of the road delineators is a fondamental security factor and must be the best as possible. The night, the luminosity is supplied essentially by the light of the vehicle. This luminosity is weak, strongly directional and illuminates the road delineators under very small angles. Thus, these delineators, in order to be efficient, must retro-reflect the light (ie. in the incident direction) as soon as possible.

A very efficient way to increase the road delineator retro-reflection, is to add glass beads on these surfaces. However, the efficiency of these products is strongly dependent of several parameters, like the size of the glass beads and their granulometric densities, their surfacic densities, their sinking in the paint,...

These present research consists to develop an algorithm with the intention to simulate, analyze and optimize this optic system. For the one glass bead problem, we use a ray-tracing model (ie. a pure geometrical approach) and we include also absorption and scattering by the paint. For the global problem, we use a statistical Monte-Carlo approach, including all optical properties of the paint.







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