2020 Volume 59 Issue 1 Pages 142-148
Recently, environmental consideration is required in various business field, in the context of global energy and environmental issues. In the field of our multi function printer (MFP) business as well, efforts for improving energy efficiency is increasingly demanded. The low temperature fixability of toner is focused in terms of energy-conservation of MFP. Chemical method toner has superiority in low temperature fixability, since it is highly flexible in controlling size, shape, structure and amount of internal additives such as wax. However, it also has some disadvantages that it requires large scale of facility investment and washing process which needs tremendous amount of water for removing surfactant. On the other hand, pulverized method toner has advantages such as minimized facility investment and fine dispersion of internal additives by melt-kneading in binder resin in the state of high viscosity, while it has disadvantages in controlling structure and handling low-melting-point materials, and therefore, it has a difficulty in satisfying both low temperature fixability and storage stability at a high level. Recently, however, some pulverized toner, which has overcome those specific issues and achieved comparable performance of low temperature fixability to that of chemical toners, has brought to market. In this paper, we report on our approach for energy saving with our pulverized toner technology.
