The American Chemical Society has awarded a group of Xerox researchers with its “Award for Team Innovation” for a new kind of ink that produces higher-quality images with less energy.
The team was formally presented with the award in March, but a new video offers more detail into the invention.
The invention, “Emulsion aggregation toner,” is a fine ink powder — just like normal toner used in laser printers — that produces sharper color images with 30 percent less electricity and reduced carbon emissions.
For Xerox, it’s a competitive advantage to help its business (and increasingly, consumer) customers reduce the cost of laser printing. For science, it’s a neat lab innovation.
Traditional toner involves melting a polymer with pigment in it, letting it solidify, then grinding it down to a powder. Xerox sought to create smaller particle sizes that allow it to use less ink per page. The problem: more grinding requires more energy, eliminating the advantage of the smaller particles.
Instead of mechanically breaking down the toner material into powder, the researchers thought to reverse the process, and build the powder through the use of nanoparticles and a chemical process.
In the lab, researchers Patricia Burns and Grazyna Kmiecik-Lawrynowicz took a liquid material that resembles house paint and added ingredients such as pigments for color and waxes. Then they allowed them to stick together and dry out over time, creating a fine powder that can be used in a toner cartridge — no grinding necessary.
That’s a great innovation, but unless the technique can scale to Xerox levels of commercial manufacturing — millions of toner cartridges produced each year, cheaply — it’s of no use.
That’s where researchers Chieh-Min Cheng and Tie Hwee Ng came in. The pair discovered that scaling the process changed the chemical properties for one of the necessary precursor materials, causing problems. To address it, they went back to the lab to redevelop the process with those chemical properties in consideration. Voila: better toner for less.
Here’s the video:
Prized Science 2011 - Episode 5 - A Revolutionary New “Dry Ink” for Laser Printers & Photocopy Machines from ACS Pressroom on Vimeo.
