Pre formed road markings make roads more environmentally friendly and safe

Driving safety cannot be separated from road traffic signs and markings. Road traffic signs and markings are traffic safety facilities composed of various lines, arrows, text, vertical markings, protruding road signs, and contour signs on the road surface. It is an important component of highway construction and one of the important transportation engineering facilities to ensure traffic safety and improve road service quality. The numbers indicate that the correlation rate between road traffic markings and accidents reaches 70%, and setting reasonable and high-performance road markings can increase transportation capacity by 30%.

In the past, traditional road traffic signs and markings were made using hot-melt marking paint. Nowadays, there is a better new type of road marking product – road pre formed marking tape that can replace it. Recently, led by Peng Yichuan, a doctoral supervisor and associate professor in the Department of Comprehensive Traffic Information and Control Engineering at Tongji University, the research project on the performance of highway pre formed standard lines has passed expert review after eight months of work and experimentation. This project fills the research gap in the field of pre formed marking tape in China’s transportation infrastructure, laying the foundation for the research of pre formed marking tape in road traffic safety management in China. It aims to provide reference for the engineering practice of pre formed marking tape and reduce or avoid traffic accidents.

Pre formed road marking strips, as a new type of marking strip, have been widely used in countries such as Germany, France, the United States, and Japan. Compared to marking coatings, pre formed marking strips have made significant progress in production processes and road performance. It not only improves some of the shortcomings of the marking coating itself, but also brings more advantages and has good application prospects.

The construction process of hot-melt marking also consumes a large amount of energy, including the melting process, cleaning and drying of the road surface in the marking area before marking the reference line, and the marking, removal and alteration of the marking line, which can cause serious environmental pollution to water resources, soil, and air. There are multiple environmental problems such as heavy metal, carbon dioxide emissions, dust and noise pollution.

Pre formed marking tape mainly uses rubber type pressure-sensitive adhesive and resin type pressure-sensitive adhesive, with rubber type production mostly using hot melt coating technology, and resin type generally using solvent or water-based coating technology. Resin based pressure-sensitive adhesives are transitioning from solvents to water-based, mainly represented by acrylic pressure-sensitive adhesives, which have the advantages of high initial adhesion, good transparency, excellent aging resistance, wide bonding surface, non-toxic and non flammable, low cost, safe operation, no pollution, and belong to water-based environmentally friendly products.

On the other hand, the marking strip is set on the road surface, which not only has to withstand sun, rain, wind, frost, snow, and freezing, but also resist the impact and wear of various vehicle loads. Therefore, the performance of road markings under complex road conditions is a very important performance. The research team also conducted relevant tests and comparisons on the performance of road markings, including water resistance, alkali resistance, wear resistance, skid resistance, adhesion, compression resistance, durability, and removal of alterations, based on different road environmental and stress conditions.

The experimental results indicate that the pre formed markings can effectively meet the requirements of water resistance and alkali resistance. It is particularly outstanding in terms of skid resistance. In the wear resistance test, by recording the weight difference between the pre formed marking and the hot-melt marking after friction with the automatic rutting tester at the same ambient temperature, it was found that the pre formed marking tape not only reduces weight by 25% compared to the hot-melt marking, but also has better wear resistance. Moreover, the wear resistance of the pre formed marking meets the standard requirements – the friction coefficient of the marking after new application is between 0.6-0.8.

The adhesion test shows that the pre formed marking has high adhesion. In the compressive strength test, a pressure testing machine was used for measurement, and the final test results showed that the compressive strength of the white pre formed marking was 23.2MPa, and the compressive strength of the yellow pre formed marking was 23.6 MPa, which is much higher than the compressive strength standard specified in the specifications of ≥ 12MPa, and also higher than the tested hot-melt marking of 21MPa. That is, the pre formed marking has a stronger ability to resist permanent deformation of the marking caused by vehicle axle load.

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