Pixel-Pixel Electrical 'Cross Talk' Through Liquid Toner Developer and Resultant Image Degradation

摘要

One normally conceptualizes and analyzes electrophotographic liquid toner development as proceeding strictly between an electrically-biased developer electrode and a photoreceptor, with a more or less "perpendicularly-constrained" development current flow. That is, one typically ignores the "local lateral conduction" through the liquid toner near the photoreceptor surface which tends to "short-together" the closely-spaced, adjacent image pixels which are at different surface potentials. In this paper, an analog electronic circuit model is used to analyze dynamically the local lateral electric currents through the liquid toner close to the photoreceptor surface, driven by adjacent image pixels at different initial potentials. This is herein termed "pixel-pixel cross talk." It presents a quantitative and comprehensive, dynamic "picture" of the lateral current transients (cross talk currents) as the image pixels traverse the development nip, along with the resultant edge degradation and "single-pixel-fill-in." It predicts and demonstrates the effects of development gap, liquid toner conductivity, photoreceptor thickness, process speed, etc., and whether changes in these parameters will ameliorate or aggravate the image degradation. The circuit model results are in excellent agreement with experiment; give powerful additional insight into the transient dynamics of the cross talk effects, and suggests ways to reduce the degradation.