Toners for Xerographic Textile Printing Produced by Means of Thermally Induced Phase Separation

The xerographic process is one of the digital printing technologies with a potential for textile printing. One barrier to the use of xerography for printing textiles is the lack of textile-specific toners that produce the required textile properties. Attempts have been made to produce textile-specific toners through mechanical grinding processes such as jet milling, but mechanical grinding requires that the toner resins be sufficiently brittle. In our previous work, toner compounds containing resins that are sufficiently flexible for the required textile properties could not be ground to the required particle size for xerography. In this paper, thermally induced phase separation (TIPS) is used to overcome this difficulty. Isotactic polypropylene (IPP) and poly(ethylene-co-vinyl acetate) (EVA) are converted into toners by means of TIPS. The EVA polymers meet the flexibility and colorfastness require ments of textile printing.