XEROX NEW PRODUCT DESIGNS FOR TONERS

[Anonymous]

Xerox Redesigns Products for Lower Energy Use, Meeting Tough
New EPA ENERGY STAR Criteria

ROCHESTER, N.Y.–April  2007–Over the
past two years, Xerox Corporation scientists and engineers have trained their
sights on developing products that use significantly less energy. The payoff:
More than half of the company’s office and production product offerings meet
the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s rigorous new ENERGY STAR(R)
requirements that went into effect on April 1.

Previously the ENERGY STAR criteria for office copiers, printers and
multifunction systems measured power consumed in standby and low-power modes.
The new standard asks a different question: How much energy would the device
use during a typical week? It measures the energy consumed if the system mimics
the tempo of a normal office, running a sample job mix with downtime for lunch,
overnight and on weekends. The result is a Typical Electricity Consumption
(TEC) figure that must meet the EPA’s tough new requirements in order for a
product to achieve ENERGY STAR status.

Patricia Calkins, Xerox vice president, Environment, Health and Safety, said,
“The EPA’s new ENERGY STAR requirements raise the bar so significantly
that only 25 percent of products in the marketplace were expected to meet the
new criteria. At Xerox, we knew we could do better than the industry average,
and we did with more than 50 percent of our current product line passing this
tough test. Over time, the standards will get even tougher. We’ll remain
focused on improving our entire product line to meet these evolving
requirements. And, we expect to qualify more products over time.”

A commitment to the environment and energy conservation

As an ENERGY STAR Charter Partner since the early 1990s, Xerox has long applied
its technical expertise to building energy savings into its products. About two
years ago, it took a fresh look at all the subsystems in its laser-printing
based products, hoping to bring the power usage down even further. As a result,
engineers identified four opportunities to cut power consumption: the fuser,
the toner, the electronic controls and the xerographic system.

In the xerographic process, a copy or print is made by digitally capturing the
image to be printed; exposing the image on a photoreceptor; developing the
image with pigmented powder, which is called toner; and then transferring the
image created by the toner onto paper and heating it to fuse the image and make
a print.

Kenneth J. Buck, a senior systems engineer who worked on the project, said,
“One example of the company’s success is the WorkCentre(R) 4150, which
prints at 45 pages per minute. It’s a black-and-white, desktop multifunction
system for small and medium-sized businesses, and it uses 11.9 kilowatt-hours
per week of electricity. That’s roughly half the energy consumption of a
comparable 45 ppm multifunction system of three years ago.”

Faster fusing

Office products like printers, copiers, and multifunction systems are active
about 10 percent of the time. The rest of the time, they are in a standby or
“sleep” mode, where the fuser roll cools and uses less power. The
dilemma: The “deeper” the sleep, the less power they use, but the
longer it takes before they are ready to print again.

Xerox developed fuser rolls with thinner walls that would heat up faster for
some products; for others, it changed from a roller to a thin metal belt with a
heater.

As a result of the technical changes to the product line, one new
black-and-white product will use 75 percent less energy to emerge from the deep
sleep than it did previously. Warm-up times for Xerox’s color laser printers
have also been significantly reduced.

Improved toner and controls

Xerox is using toner made by its patented emulsion aggregation process in more
products to reduce energy consumption. Not only does the EA manufacturing
process require less energy, but the toner consumes less energy when used to
make a print. That’s because its rich colors and regular particle size mean
devices need less EA Toner than conventional toner to create an image, so
there’s less thermal mass to heat.

Xerox scientists have also worked to develop toners with lower melting points,
which consume less energy in the fuser. These have enabled Xerox to reduce
fusing temperatures by about 10 percent in some products. In the xerographic
system engineers have developed ways to charge and erase the photoreceptor more
efficiently using less energy.

Other innovations include redesign of the control electronics in the devices to
take advantage of next-generation processors and save energy.

Energy efficiency developments are part of Xerox’s ongoing investments in
sustainable innovation — or “green products” — that deliver
measurable benefits to the environment and help Xerox customers work in more
environmentally friendly offices. These include solid ink printing technology,
which generates 90 percent less waste than comparable laser printers,
document-management services and software that improve workers’ productivity
while reducing dependency on paper, and other paper-saving innovations.

In addition, Xerox is contributing $1 million to The Nature Conservancy to
develop science-based tools and systems that will help the paper industry
better manage ecologically important forest land.
The funding focuses on the Canadian Boreal Forest as well as the forests of the
southern United States, Indonesia and Brazil’s Atlantic Forest.

[Author]

April 13, 2007 at 10:54 AM