Tribology in Plastic Sliding Materials for Office Automation Equipment

摘要

In recent years, an increase of the operational speed and the image quality as well as a size and weight reduction and a reduction in noise level and the energy consumption of office automation (OA) equipment, such as copying machines, laser printers and so on, has grown steadily not only due to market demand, but also the demand for environmental protection. In particular, during the past several years, after a change of models, improving performance almost at an unchanged established cost has been observed everywhere, and progress in cost performance is evident. It can be easily supposed that this progress has been achieved by creative originality and close cooperation of technological units of different makers; the positive and effective application of plastics as one of the measures for cost reduction is an important item that cannot be neglected. Plastic components for OA equipment, as with other plastic components, are individually made using the injection molding process, and because the degree of design freedom offered by plastics is very high, reducing the number of components and a high mass production ability of the injection molding process produce a cost merit much higher than that obtained by other methods, although many specialists argue about some points in the problem of value analysis vs. value engineering. However, on the other hand, another problem related to a shift of operation conditions to severe ones for sliding components appeared with a recent stepwise reduction of the size and the weight and resulted from friction and wear. In that case, lack of optimism in an increase of loads applied to plastic materials was noted quite clearly. Establishing such trends forces the makers of plastics source materials and the makers of sliding components to deal in many cases with problems of developing a higher performance in existing sliding materials, and active work in the direction of solving the problem is underway.