Characteristics and Assessment of Printer Toner Adhesion

Understanding the adhesion behavior and characteristics of toner film is required to achieve image and text printing with high quality resolution. Toner can be considered as a thin film coating on a media such as paper or polymer film. Quantitative measurement of adhesion characteristics of the thin film is important to assess the reliability of the system. In this work the main objective was to investigate the adhesion characteristic between the toner and the media by ramp loading scratch test method. The scratch test may be used to obtain quantitative information about the adhesion of the film to the substrate. In the scratch test a diamond tip was used to scratch the surface of the toner film under an increasing normal load until the toner detached or fractured. The critical load (LC) was obtained from the experimental results. Also, the relationship between the critical load and the adhesive strength of the interface between the substrate and the toner was obtained by measuring the normal and tangential forces during the scratch test. Finally, theoretical analysis of the toner scratch characteristics was performed based on Benjamin and Weaver theory, Plowing model, and Laugier model.