抄録
Recently various CPT (chemically produced toner) technologies have emerged as technical and economical alternatives for producing small sized toners and thus improving the performance of electro-photography. Among the CPTs, polymerized toners generally have a small particle size, a narrow size distribution, and a regular shape, and these characteristics provide better printing performance and brilliant images as compared to the conventional toner. However, the CPT technology based on polymerization method presents several difficulties such as process and equipment complexity, potential for contamination of toner particles by unreacted monomer, inflexibilityofformulation variation and so on.
We developed a novel chemical milling (CM) method of producing small toner particles, which has the advantages of the polymerization methods but are free of the above-mentioned disadvantages. The spherical toner particles produced by the chemical milling method may have the mean diameter at any value in the range of 3-15Fdm with a simple adjustment of process parameters. The particles generally have a narrow size distribution with the span (=(d90-d10)/d50) value of as low as 0.4. Furthermore, the CM toner is able to meet most consumers' needs for electro-photography by virtue of wide range of controllability and flexibility regarding the key properties such as charging, fusing, and color reproduction.
