Intellectual Property Law

US Patent 7551884 - Carbon nanotube cleaning blade

Cleaning blades are important to laser printers for removing toner from the photosensitive drum used in transferring images to paper. This patent from Toshiba teaches how to use carbon nanotube or fullerene material to enhance the durability and lifetime of such cleaning blades. Claim 1 reads:

1. A cleaning apparatus provided with a cleaning blade which removes a developer remaining on a surface of an image carrier, wherein the cleaning blade is made of a resinous matrix dispersion in which at least one of a fullerene and a carbon nano tube is dispersed, and at least one of the fullerene and the carbon nano tube is mixed and dispersed in a total amount of from 0.02 to 20 parts by weight based on 100 parts by weight of the resinous matrix in the cleaning blade.

Full post as published by TinytechIP on June 24, 2009 (boomark / email).