JPS58156611A - Sheet material for road surface mark - Google Patents

Abstract

(57) [Summary] This bulletin contains application data before electronic filing, so abstract data is not recorded.

Description

DETAILED DESCRIPTION OF THE INVENTION In order to clearly mark the direction of travel on road surfaces such as automobile highways and airports, the present invention involves bonding a thin layer of marking strips to road surfaces such as road sections, and coating them with retro-reflective material. The present invention relates to equipped with successively spaced apart wedge-shaped protrusions, and more particularly to a rounded and improved nine marker strip for such purpose.

Because the angle between a car's headlights and the road they illuminate is extremely shallow, only a small percentage of the light is reflected back for use by the driver. The rounding problem is even more serious as the road surface is usually very flat and has poor light reflective properties. From this perspective, black asphalt is a horrible road surface. The average road visibility in the downward light of a car's headlamps at night is typically 100 feet) (!i0.48 m
). If you spot the white lines on the road surface, you can see the improvement in Kanapu, but even with freshly painted lines, road visibility does not significantly exceed that of 200 feet (C60, 94 feet). Furthermore, when the road surface becomes wet from the rain, visibility even on freshly painted surfaces is drastically reduced, making it impossible to see beyond a few dozen feet. A thin layer of water covering the road or painted surface
This is because almost all of the light from the car's headlights is reflected back to the driver.

In this way, at night on rainy days, even if a car is equipped with a fine white line, it becomes nothing more than pitch black for the driver. This is the biggest reason why driving at night in the rain is truly unreliable.

It was concluded that the only practical solution was to lift the sign off the pavement and place it above a thin layer of water, allowing more reflected light to be reflected back to motorists. This method can be used in some regions, especially in areas with warm climates, but in areas with heavy lightning, snowplows have a destructive effect, so they are rarely used. Attempts have been made to prevent damage by guiding the blade upwards of the sign, but some signs are not subject to harsh handling by snowplows, and this has not led to widespread use.

Moreover, such specialized structures are expensive and are therefore usually located far apart from each other. In addition, these are only effective at night when illuminated by car headlamps, and are very difficult to see during the starry hours. In many cases, an extra sign is necessary.

However, for many years, attempts were made to arrange combinations of various types of floating pavement markings. Its main purpose was for drivers driving at night, but most of the devices were difficult to see during the day and were of little use. By the way, these devices are limited to nighttime use where the illumination from the vehicle's headlamps is re-reflected back by internal reflection and is therefore perceived by the vehicle operator. These devices often take the form of a button or mound with a retroreflective element surface.

Recently, a ramp-like arrangement has been adopted to reduce the risk of damage when a car runs over it, and a device with a special curvature that cannot be removed by snowplow blades has actually appeared. . Such devices, as previously mentioned, require expensive rounding and placement along the road surface at small intervals. As a result, under headlamp illumination at night,
-You can see the distance, but at most it only emits light at the tip of the bottle, so it doesn't create a continuous solid line, and it doesn't come close to interlacing lines. In daylight, it is usually invisible to motorists at any distance.

In order to improve the above-mentioned drawbacks of this type of floating pavement markings, markings with a relatively low profile have been proposed. U.S. Patent No. 3,785.719.4.0!55,059
, and 4,279,471.

However, each of these ideas requires a high production cost for each unit, and when considering practicality and cost, 2, the intervals between the units must be made quite wide to be viable.

The best way to overcome these problems is to use thin, flexible sheets with a large number of low profile floating pavement markings, as described above. Thus my former U.S. Patent No. 3,920,54
6; 4,040,760; and 4,069.7
87 iAdditional Percentage Number 4,145,112;4.1
82,548? and 4,256.788 were proposed and mourned.

Apart from the configurations of No. 4,040,740 and No. 4,069,787, the other patents all relate to sheet signs in which the main body of the sign is made of a light-transmitting material.

The device is subject to significant light loss effects during use due to wear and dust accumulation.

Our above configuration, in which a continuous serrated wedge is placed on a thin road adhesive strip, achieves the desired results, but also improves the appearance of shadows when facing the sun. After being used for a long period of time, it was damaged by an exploratory vehicle and the wedge shape was somewhat worn out, and the markings under difficult conditions such as daylight and dusk were still insufficient.

My patent number 4 using triangular wedge, 040,74
0, road signs become somewhat difficult for drivers to see under certain daylight conditions after long periods of use.9. Especially if the sign strip is placed in such a way that the driver faces roughly in the direction of the sun on a clear day1,... 11A111*Wt
i! ! 1liho°/112) 1llll'1KiT, making it difficult to identify the signs. During these nine conditions, the sun will cast a wedge shadow over the valley between the wedges. Furthermore, all of those sides of the wedge that are visible to the driver go into the shadows, making it difficult to distinguish between the dark road surface and the sign. On a clear day, when the sun enters at a low angle, the apparent darkness, that is, the poor contrast between the sign and the road surface, reaches its peak.

Changing the sawtooth shape from triangular to trapezoidal and adjusting the spacing between the wedges completely eliminates this problem, and at the same time provides other benefits, namely improved wear resistance [2, reduced wear life due to damage caused by snowplows, etc.] It was unexpectedly discovered that it could be extended. When dimensioned and spaced properly, the flat top surface of a trapezoidal wedge reflects sunlight and solves the wedge shadow problem nicely.

Therefore, it is an object of the present invention to overcome the above-mentioned drawbacks, etc., and eliminate shadow problems, light discontinuities, etc. [2. To provide a new sign structure that is improved to withstand wear and use under any conditions. It is to be.

Another object of the invention is to provide a roadway made of flexible sheet material that is as continuous as the retroreflection from a car's headlamp at night, even in rainy conditions. It is to provide a sign.

Yet another object is to provide a pavement marking constructed of a flexible sheet material with a low profile and a configuration that will not be damaged by normal snow plow operations.

Yet another object is to provide a highly visible highway sign for night driving that has a long life and maintains excellent retroreflective performance during use.

Another object is to provide a new marker that is even more general shaving friendly.

Other objects will be described hereinafter and will be more particularly pointed out in the appended claims.

However, if we summarize the present invention from one point, it is possible to pre-form a flexible plastic that can be bonded to a road surface etc. and adhered to a wrinkled surface by a thin adhesive layer between the road surface and the like. is intermittently deformed upwards to laterally successively arrange wedge-shaped protrusions having substantially trapezoidal shapes in its longitudinal cross-section, each wedge-shaped protrusion having an acute slope on its front and rear surfaces. having a substantially flat top surface separated by upward and downward slopes having nine slopes with retroreflective beads embedded in the slopes, the width of the top surface being equal to the width of the strip between adjacent wedge-shaped protrusions. The width of the valley surface is approximately equal to #1,
It is intended as a directional road marking strip.

The details of the configuration and the best example will be described later.

The present invention will be explained based on the accompanying explanatory drawings.

In FIG. 1, a longitudinally extending and flexible thin plastic road marking strip 1 is glued to a surface R, such as a road, by means of a bottom adhesive layer 4. Materials are mentioned in my previous patent and subsequent descriptions. As mentioned above, the serrated wedge-shaped structure is shown, and the wedge-shaped protrusion T, which is approximately trapezoidal in longitudinal section, has a flat top surface 2 and a round surface with upward and downward slopes on the front and rear surfaces. 2' and 2N. All these faces extend in the lateral direction Kffi of the strip 1.

Preferably molded in one piece with a strip 1 of thin plastic sheet, the wedge is intermittently deformed upwards from the slip.

As will be explained later, the range of the acute angle a (also called the downward angle) has an important relationship with the performance during use. 5 consisting of layers etc. is formed.

In this configuration, my previous patent describes a case in which the surface portion of one wedge is continuous with the surface portion of the next wedge, and the surface portion is apparently extended. In the case of the trapezoidal wedge shown in Figure #11, #i is not the case, and it was found that the apparent union of the surfaces is interrupted by the width of the flat top surface of the trapezoidal wedge T. Considering daytime driving, including when facing the sun, when this diffusely reflective flat top surface 2 has the same apparent area as the observable part of the wedge surface in the shadow, It was found that the visual influence was sufficiently weakened to the point where it was possible to distinguish sign 1 from road-oriented sign R and from harmful birds. The present invention provides sign display with such daylight and twilight considerations that were not adequately provided for in the structures of previous patents. Due to the increased area,
The daylight contrast between the sign and the road surface is rather positive: [7
However, the nighttime retroreflection from car headlights
The brightness of Jr. has decreased 0 The condition for equalizing the apparent areas is to make the width of the flat top surface 20 of the trapezoidal wedge T approximately equal to (comparable to) that of the valley 1' between the adjacent wedges. ). For the purposes of the present invention, the height of the wedge is a fraction of the width (longitudinal) of the wedge. It was also decided that the number should be around #'1176 for the sake of convenience.

Tests have shown that the sign strip of FIG. 1 with the following dimensions shows l1llllII! It has been shown that it has good observability and is also retroreflective at night.

Angle value: 0~45@←Refractive index n
= 1.9) When viewed from a light source incident at an angle of approximately 85” from the vertical,
In front of surface 2', the return of light due to retroreflection from 2" is perfect. With the pavement surface RK, late in the afternoon on a clear day,
When the marking strip 1' is oriented such that the strong shadow of the slopes 2', 2'' projects onto the valley 1' between them, and viewed at an angle of 45° to 85° from the normal to the general direction of the sun, The sign was clearly visible in nine bright tones, unlike the dark road surface.In the nighttime retroreflection experiment, the sign was clearly visible at a distance of 1,200 feet (approximately 3
66 m) The driver is 10 m away from the dead place on the wedge slope.
I could see the top row of beads in the mill (0.25m).

In FIG. 2 it can be seen that retroreflective beads 5 are applied over the entire surface of the marking strip 1.

To fabricate sign strips of a particular shape according to the present invention, a mold made of an aluminum block, for example, 4 inches wide (10,2) and 7 inches thick (L27a+) may be used. The groove wrinkle for the sample mentioned above corresponds to the top surface 2 of the sign and has a width of 300 mils (7,62 mm) on the top.
, 2′, 2″ depth 5Ω mil<+, 2ywa>
, the gradient is, for example, so@. The spacing between each groove type is 6oo
It was set as a mill (15, 24m). 5 mils thick (0,1!i
Glue the narrow polyethylene ring IJ tube (m) to the inclined wall of the mold groove with a suitable heat-resistant adhesive 4, and heat the mold to about 280 degrees below (approximately 138°C) to form glass mold globules 3. A diameter of 10 mil (0.254 mm) and a refracted rod of 1.9 mm were placed in the groove and press-fitted into the softened polyethylene. After the mold cools, the excess microspheres are removed and the remaining microspheres are approximately 40 mm in diameter.
Fill the polyethylene to an extremely deep depth (only 9 pieces were buried).Next, add white pigment, fill the miso with 9 pvo of plastisol, and fill the top side with about 15 liters of plastisol.
0,! Covered to a depth of $8m). This was placed in a heated oven and heated to approximately 330'F (approximately 165.5C) for a sufficient period of time until the plastisol melted and became uniform. After cooling, when the PVG casting is removed from the mold, the microspheres are tightly packed into the slope of the PVG casting, that is, the slope of the wedge wall, to a diameter of about 60 mm.

Further modifications will be apparent to those skilled in the art from the above description and are all considered to be within the spirit and scope of the invention as defined in the appended claims.

[BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE DRAWINGS] FIG. 1 is a longitudinal sectional view of a specific example of the present invention.
FIG. 2 shows another similar diagram. 1...Nine-thin layer made of flexible plastic
Road sign) IJ tube (strip) 1'...
- Valley surface 2...Flat top surface 2"...Downward slope rear slope 3...Retroreflective bead layer (made of glass) 4...Bottom adhesive layer R...Surface T of roads, etc. ...Wedge shape of a trapezoid a...-Angle formed by an uphill or downhill slope and a perpendicular line Applicant's agent Gei Furutani

Claims (1)

[Scope of Claims] 1. It is made of a pre-molded flexible plastic that can be bonded to a road surface etc. and adhered to the surface by a thin adhesive layer between the road surface and the like. In this case, the wedge-shaped protrusions each having a roughly trapezoidal shape are intermittently deformed upward so that they are successively arranged in the lateral direction, and each wedge-shaped protrusion is rounded with ascending and descending slopes having acute angles on the front and rear surfaces. The partition has a generally flat top surface with retro-reflective beads placed on its slope, and the width of the top surface is equal to the width of the valley surface in the strip between adjacent wedge-shaped centerpieces. A road marking strip for direction indication, characterized in that it is approximately comparable to the radius of the road. 2. A directional strip according to claim 1, characterized in that its acute angle is substantially in the range 0'' to 45°. 5. IJ knob 04 whose width is several hundred mils S*, and whose fraction is 7-mechanical 5. The direction indicating strip according to claim 5, characterized in that the retroreflective beads are incorporated all over its flat top surface, front surface, rear surface and valley surface. The direction indicating device according to claim 1, characterized in that:
Whelk. 6 The beads are placed in the strut IJ tube material approximately 60 mm in diameter.
The livestock meat indicating strip according to claim 1, characterized in that the strip is summarized by *t.