SBIR Phase I: New Traffic Stripe 1,000 Times Brighter than Current Technology

The broader/commercial impact of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will be a substantial reduction in fatalities from vehicle crashes at nighttime by using a new ultra-bright traffic stripe. Brighter road stripes reduce crashes, and the new stripe is 1,000 times brighter. By enabling the development of the new traffic stripe from an environmentally friendly polymer, this project will also help eliminate a major source of environmental damage.

When fully adopted, the new traffic stripe will reduce the tons of arsenic and lead dumped onto American highways each year when applying conventional traffic stripes composed of glass beads dropped into white paint. Considering only the white edge lines on U.S. interstate highways, the market for the new traffic stripe is $3.6 billion at $3 per foot installed cost and over 1,300 lives could be saved per year.

Economic analysis of the new stripe shows a huge benefit to cost ratio due to the economic value of American lives saved.

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will attempt to advance a unique ultra-bright traffic stripe technology from the laboratory toward the highway. The new stripe uses prismatic structures on both top and bottom surfaces of a thin polymer film to retroreflect incident light from distant headlights back toward the driver and sensors of the vehicle.

The new stripe has already been shown in certified retroreflectivity testing of early prototypes to be 968 times brighter than the 2022 Federal Highway Administration standard of 50 mcd/m2-lux. Under the NSF SBIR program, a radical new approach to master tooling will be attempted, using gray scale lithography to cost-effectively provide millions of microscopic cube-corner prisms on the bottom surface of the film.

Two sets of light-turning prisms for dry and wet conditions will be molded onto the top surface of the same thin film of transparent polymer. In Phase I, small building blocks will be tooled, molded, and assembled into testable prototype stripes, with retroreflectivity measured in a certified laboratory. In Phase II, a mass-production process will be implemented, and on-road qualification testing will be done. These critical results will enable the technology to be licensed to an established manufacturer.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.