Classification of Glass Microbeads

　　Glass beads are made by firing glass sand.

　　Glass beads can be classified into glass microbeads and glass beads based on their size.

　　By application, glass microbeads can be categorized into reflective glass microbeads, glass microbeads for sandblasting and shot peening, glass microbeads for grinding, and glass microbeads for filling. Among these, reflective glass microbeads can further be divided into safety and protective reflective glass microbeads and screen-use reflective glass microbeads.

　　Based on refractive index, glass microbeads can be further classified into ordinary-refractive-index and high-refractive-index types. The typical refractive index ranges from 1.5 to 1.64, while high-refractive-index beads generally fall between 1.8 and 2.2. For reflective applications, glass microbeads with a refractive index of 1.93 are particularly suitable. This refractive index enables perfect refraction of parallel light rays back toward their source. Therefore, it’s not necessarily true that the higher the refractive index, the better the reflective effect.

　　By shape, they can be further classified into regular glass beads and irregular glass beads. By color, they can also be divided into colored glass beads and colorless transparent glass beads.