Super Toner and Ink Repellent Superoleophobic Surface

Offset of imaging material from a fuser surface to paper during fusing is highly undesirable in printing. Here the wetting and repellent characteristics of three imaging materials (a solid wax ink, a waxy polyester toner, and a polyester toner) in their molten states have been studied on three model print surfaces: a transparency (surrogate for paper), a PTFE film, and a model superoleophobic surface, with the aim of assessing their performance in fusing. The superoleophobic surface, with water and hexadecane contact angles of ∼156° and sliding angles at ∼10°, comprises 3 μm diameter pillar arrays on silicon wafer and was fabricated by photolithography followed by surface modification with a fluorosilane. The contact angles of the three imaging materials range from 40 to 79° on the transparency and the sessile drops do not slide even at 90° tilted angle, indicating that they all wet, adhere, and pin on the transparency. Although the contact angles of the three imaging materials are slightly higher (63–85°) on PTFE, the sessile drops do not slide on PTFE either. Because PTFE is widely used as a fuser surface material in combination with different waxy imaging materials commercially, we attribute the successful implementation of PTFE to the use of the wax additive. With the superoleophobic surface, there is a dramatic increase in advancing and static contact angles for all three imaging materials. The advancing and static contact angles are in the 150–168° range for waxy toner, indicative of superhigh repellency. Although the advancing and static contact angles for the polyester toner decrease slightly at 147 and 130°, respectively, the repellency is still very high. More importantly, the sessile drops of all three imaging materials are mobile upon tilting and they all have high receding contact angles. The overall results suggest that the adhesion between the superoleophobic surface and the ink and toner materials are very small relative to those with paper and PTFE. The important of high repellency and low adhesion to offset performance is discussed.