Radiochemical Investigation of Blade Cleaning Lubricants

Operation of an elastomeric blade requires the use of a boundary lubricant to remove residual xerographic toner from the photoreceptor efficiently. A radioactive tracer technique was used to study the behaviour of a number of lubricants used in the xerographic process. Both filming and nonfilming type lubricants were investigated using this technique. The results indicated that the lubricant film deposited on the photoreceptor must be in the thickness range of from 1 to 3 molecular layers for acceptable xerographic development and cleaning. Film thickness was shown to be dependent on the class of lubricant, the concentration of lubricant in toner, and the inclusion of a silica compound in the toner. Films are dynamic in nature, continuously being formed and removed during the xerographic process. Parameters affecting the filming mechanism are discussed.     

Sequencing for minimal tooling replacements via a variety of objective functions

This research presents a technique dedicated to obtaining production sequences resulting in minimal tooling replacements. Having sequences that result in fewer tooling replacements can result in savings owing to a smaller requirement for tooling media, and the reduced labour required to change the tooling. A variety of objective functions were used to assess the 'evenness' of tool wear, as it is assumed here that more evenness in tool wear would extend the life of the tooling. Because of the combinatorial complexity of sequencing problems, simulated annealing was used as a search engine to find sequences having desirable levels of the aforementioned objective function values. These obtained sequences were then simulated in a manufacturing environment to determine how many tooling replacements were required for the objective function of interest. Experimentation has demonstrated that the research presented here provides results generally superior to those of an earlier published effort in terms of the required tooling replacements (McMullen et al . 2002).