Enhancement of polarization properties of reflective composite sheet

We propose a substantially improved reflective composite sheet design, in which the fibers in the layers are shifted periodically with respect to those in the underlying layer to eliminate even the slightest light leakage. Furthermore, to broaden the bandwidth, the fibers between the upper and lower layers are intentionally overlapped. Commercial software was used to investigate the optical properties of the sheets, and cast-film extrusion was used to manufacture the modified reflective composite sheet. We observed that the proposed reflective composite sheet, with overlaps of more than 1 μm in size, had distinct polarization and reflectance characteristics and, thus, confirmed the feasibility of the design for the production of actual reflective polarizers. In fact, 10-layer composite sheet configurations exhibited a high polarization efficiency of more than 90% in the entire visible range.