New NIST Facility Soon Will Be ‘Reflecting’ on Safer Signs
© R. Rathe
Our roadways should get safer in the future, now that the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has developed a way to accurately and reliably measure how light reflects off stop signs and other road markings.
Road signs and markings are designed to be visible at night by retroreflectivity—that is, they reflect some of the light emitted by a vehicle’s headlights back toward the driver’s eyes. However, measurements of retroreflectivity have varied so much among different devices and laboratories that federal transportation officials have been unable to define minimum standards for this Congressionally mandated characteristic.
Recently, NIST established a facility—funded by the Transportation Research Board of the National Cooperative Research Program—that resolves numerous measurement problems and improves accuracy. Inside the facility, one finds a long black tunnel with a set of tracks on which sits an instrumented platform. Signs or materials are mounted on the platform, which can be moved 3 to 30 meters (10 to 100 feet) from a light source at one end of the tunnel. Using custom software, scientists precisely control all of the components and measure the characteristics of light reflected from the sign to a detector located close to the source.
NIST expects that the facility will begin providing calibration services early in 2004.
Media Contact
More Information:
http://www.nist.gov/public_affairs/techbeat/tb2003_0811.htm#signsAll latest news from the category: Transportation and Logistics
This field deals with all spatial and time-related activities involved in bridging the gap between goods and people, including their restructuring. This begins with the supplier and follows each stage of the operational value chain to product delivery and concludes with product disposal and recycling.
innovations-report provides informative reports and articles on such topics as traffic telematics, toll collection, traffic management systems, route planning, high-speed rail (Transrapid), traffic infrastructures, air safety, transport technologies, transport logistics, production logistics and mobility.
Newest articles
Researchers show an old law still holds for quirky quantum materials
This surprising result is important for understanding unconventional superconductors and other materials where electrons band together to act collectively. Long before researchers discovered the electron and its role in generating…
Straining memory leads to new computing possibilities
Researchers develop hybrid phase-change memristors that offer fast, low-power, and high-density computing memory.# By strategically straining materials that are as thin as a single layer of atoms, University of Rochester scientists have…
A patch of protection against Zika virus
A simple-to-apply, needle-free vaccine patch is being developed to protect people from the potentially deadly mosquito-borne Zika virus. A prototype using The University of Queensland-developed and Vaxxas-commercialised high-density microarray patch…
