Toner Performance and Toner Properties Relating to High Speed Printing of Cheques, Bills and Targeted Mail

摘要

Non-Impact printed toners are being utilized more and more in industrial applications in recent years. Three such areas are billing applications, targeted mail and high volume, high speed cheque printing. All these applications place constraints in terms of toner formulation for fast non-impact printers to produce high quality documents. Billing and targeted mailings can result in fairly bulky document packages. Modern automated postal sorting systems can subject these documents to significant surface abrasion leading to a form of offset. We shall see how optimization of fixing for various fusing systems and the incorporation of low molecular weight additives can counter the effect of this abrasion. Similarly toners when used to print the MICR line on cheques are subjected to even greater abrasion effects by high speed cheque reader sorters. Using SEM photographs of printer documents, a variety of fixing tests and thermal analysis we will show how toner formulation can be optimised to provide the desired print performance. Additionally we shall see how the properties of magnetic oxides affect check reader sorter signal levels by both measuring the magnetic properties of the toners and the signal response of printed documents.