Do pedestrians – and all of us, even avid drivers, someday act in their role – to wear reflective clothing so that you don’t get knocked down in the dark? Which reflective clothing should you choose? How to wear it correctly? Whom will it help more: a child or an adult?
For children under the age of seven, the choice of reflective clothing is not bad. But buying it for schoolchildren and adults is a problem. Reflective vests or flicker bracelets are easy to find. There are also bags for changing shoes and school backpacks with reflective stripes. Correspondents of Auto review uploaded all this to the editorial “Kalina” and went to the auto testing ground.
We put the car at a fixed point to shoot the headlights, placed marking cones (it is easy to determine the distance of the pedestrian’s visibility from them), turned on the dipped beam – and first, experimentally, we found the distance at which a schoolchild in dark clothes is no longer visible in the beams of Kalinov’s headlights: 160 meters. This, by the way, is not bad: the Lada head light beats powerfully.
Now let’s put on something reflective for adults and children. AND?
The adult’s jacket shone in the headlights like a searchlight, but the stripes on the children’s down jacket barely smoldered.
The dim light was reflected by the decorations on the backpack. Although there is a much more important nuance with them: you can easily turn into invisibility if you turn to the car sideways when crossing the road or walk towards it, leaving your backpack and bag behind your back.
The same goes for the reflective bracelet (flicker). It can be hidden from the headlights in no time. Therefore, if we are to wear flickers, then it is better in pairs: one on the right hand, the other on the left.
A vest is most effective. Just like the jacket, embroidered with bright reflectors: they are visible from any angle!
But do reflectors help to increase visibility? How much longer will the driver have in terms of distance and, therefore, in time to spot pedestrians in time and slow down? The bag with “sparkles” disappeared into the dark already 180 meters from the car – it will help to “win” only 20 meters. A backpack with a patch disappeared into the darkness at 240 meters. The bracelets on the arms stopped returning the light three hundred meters away. The driver could no longer distinguish the vest on the child at a distance of 320 meters. And the farthest managed to go to an adult in a fashionable jacket, embroidered with reflective stripes – 368 meters!
In other words, the correct reflective clothing can more than double the distance at which a pedestrian can be seen. But at a speed of 90 km / h, the “extra” 160-200 meters in a few seconds that the driver will have in stock.
Interestingly, when the same flickers and vests were worn by adults instead of children, the visibility distance 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 reflector is located, 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. Clothes, however, cannot be forgotten or lost: if you don’t get dressed, you will freeze.
Reflective elements of clothing work according to somewhat different principles than reflectors known to all, that is, reflective “mirror” traps.
The first principle: fluorescent paint is applied to the fabric with the addition of a phosphor: a substance capable of converting the energy absorbed by it (primarily light) into light radiation. And the second – a reflective film with a special layer of light-transmitting polymer with the inclusion of glass microspheres that are glued or sewn onto the fabric. Its ability to reflect directionally is explained both by the intense accumulation of light by microspheres and by the mirror-lens effect, resulting from special surface treatment of the microspheres. And to increase the intensity of light reflection, a “mirror” reflective layer is placed under the microspheres.