STXM-toners

Micron 37 (2006) 290-295

Chemical component mapping of pulverized toner by scanning transmission X-ray microscopy

Noriyuki Iwata (a,b), Katsuhiko Tani (a), Atsuyuki Watada (a), Hiromi Ikeura-Sekiguchi (c), Toru Araki (d), Adam P. Hitchcock (d)*

(a) Ricoh Co Ltd, 16-1 Shinnei-cho, Tsuzuki-ku, Yokohama 224-0035, Japan
(b) Graduate School for Science, Chiba University, 1-33 Yayoi-cho, Inage-ku, Chiba 263-8522, Japan
(c) Research Institute of Instrumentation Frontier, AIST, Tsukuba, Ibaraki 305-8568, Japan
(d) Brockhouse Institute for Materials Research, McMaster University, Hamilton, ON, Canada L8S 4M1

Received 1 July 2005; revised 8 August 2005; accepted 8 August 2005

Abstract - Toners are micron scale polymer particles constructed of several kinds of resin, pigment, wax, etc. Transmission electron microscopy (TEM) is used for observation of the dispersion of the component materials in toners, but TEM images cannot identify simultaneously all components. Scanning transmission X-ray microscopy (STXM) not only provides simultaneous observation of spatial distributions of wax, resin and carbon black in toners, but it also provides detailed, quantitative, chemical information about the wax and resin environments through chemical component maps derived from multiple energy image sequences. The capabilities of STXM for toner analysis are illustrated by results of a study of a toner for black/white copy/print applications.