Recently, for the purpose of high-resolution or longer life in the electrophotographic recording system is used chemical toner or long-life photoreceptor. The role of the cleaning process is regarded as important to secure reliability, but there are many unexplained phenomena, such as the dynamic behavior of toner particles and the influence of these particles. Therefore, visualization system using a glass drum was developed to grasp various phenomena. It was to simulate an actual machine and performed a trial to elucidate a phenomenon based on effect and cause. As a result, the basic phenomena of a cleaning blade such as a stick-slip phenomenon were visualized and revealed details of those. By analyzing the flow of toner and additive in the pre-nip, it was clarified the wear mechanism, that is, the polishing effect of the additive particles is considered to be the main factor of the wear of the photoreceptor.

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The penetration of the digital printing machines using the electrophotographic process into a production printing market is expanding. Along with this trend, further improvements in resolution and reliability are requested to an organic photoreceptor. In particular, a demand for long life is escalating because of the viewpoint of print cost. Recently, highly durable organic photoreceptors incorporating an overcoat layer, based on hybrid material, have been developed. In this report, I would like to explain the overcoat technology of the organic photoreceptor as a successful application of the hybrid material for practical use, and to introduce the latest trends of development in each manufacturer.

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Organic/inorganic hybrid materials can exhibit the functions present in both organic and inorganic materials. Biominerals such as nacre of shells, teeth, and bones are organic/inorganic hybrids with complex structures that possess high functionality. Materials scientists can obtain ideas from the structures, properties, and formation processes of biominerals for creating synthetic, biomimetic materials. We believe that these materials have great potential as new functional materials. This article highlights bioinspired synthetic approaches to the development of organic/CaCO₃ hybrids using macromolecular templates.

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In resent years, nano material is very actively being investigated and carbon nanotube (CNT) which has various unique property is one of the representative material of that. CNT, especially single-wall carbon nanotube (SWCNT) has high physical properties for example electrical conductivity or thermal conductivity etc, but it was not widespread because there was not engineering method of mass production. However, a number of that method is suggested in several yeas and this situation accelerates product development. In this article, we introduced the new conductive paste that the authors developed with SWCNT and give an account of possibility with CNT. We can decrease the amount of conductive filler one tenth so it is suitable for miniaturization and weight saving.

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Coating the surface of particles or substrates attracts many attention in various industrial fields, e. g. battery materials, magnetic materials, sensors, biomaterials, pharmaceuticals, food, pigments, cosmetics, anti-abrasion materials, automobile parts, display materials, electronic materials, etc., in order to improve the quality of the product or to develop novel composite materials, by controlling the surface properties such as, improving the wear resistance, chemical resistance, or heat resistance, adding electric conductivity, catalytic function, or controlled release property, and controlling the surface wettability, etc. In this article, we will introduce the Hybridization System, which enables coating of fine particles on the surface of the carrier particles by mechanical force.

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The mechanical processes have conventionally often conducted for fabricating composite particles. However, these techniques are including several issues for designing the nano-structure of composite particles. In order to overcome these issues, novel processing technique was successfully developed to fabricate integrated composite powders by present author. The fabrication of integrated composite powder involves the sequential adsorption of oppositely charged polyelectrolytes, i.e., PSS (Poly (sodium 4-styrene sulfonate)) and PDDA (poly (diallyldimethylammoniumchloride)) on surface of matrix and additive grains, respectively in order to produce electrically charged particles. The integrated composite particles, i.e., large-sized-particles coated with nanoparticles were successively obtained by the mixing with oppositely charged particles in the solvent. We introduce here our recent research activities to fabricate integrated composite structures.

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