Estimating ink mileage of dry toners in electrophotography

This work investigates the ink mileage of dry toners in electrophotography (EP). Four different substrates were printed on a dry-toner color production Xerox iGen3 EP press. The print layout contained patches with different cyan, magenta, yellow, and black tonal values from 10% to 100%. Toner amounts on cyan patches were measured using an analytical method. Printed patches and unprinted paper samples, as well as dry toners, were dissolved in concentrated nitric acid. The copper concentrations in the dissolved solutions were analyzed by a Zeeman graphite furnace atomic absorption spectrometer. Analytical results were calculated to determine the toner amounts on paper for different tonal values. Their corresponding reflection densities were also measured. All data were plotted with OriginPro® 8 software, and four mathematical models were used for curve fitting. It was found that the C-S model fitted the experimental data of the two uncoated papers better than the other three models. None of the four models fitted the experimental data of the two coated papers, while the linear model was found to fit the data well. Linear fitting was the best in the practical density region for the two coated papers. Ink mileage curves obtained from curve fitting were used to estimate how much ink was required to achieve a target density for each paper; hence, the ink mileage was calculated. The highest ink mileage was 3.39 times the lowest ink mileage. The rougher the paper surface, the higher the requirement for ink film weight, and the lower ink mileage. No correlation was found between ink mileage and paper porosity.