Thursday, October 30, 2008

How a photocopier works


Walk into almost any office building, you'll probably find a photocopier. For most office building right now, small or large, the photocopier has become standard equipment. It is so important right now due to the produce of copied paper almost instantly. In this essay I will explain a little bit of how the process of photocopier works.
Everything starts at its heart, a copier works because of one basic physical principle which is opposite charges attract. Inside a copier there is a special drum. The drum is charge with a form of static electricity. An intense beam of light moves across the paper that you have placed on the copier's glass surface. Light is then reflected from white areas of the paper and strikes the drum below.

Wherever a photon of light hits the surface of the paper, electrons are emitted from the photoconductive atoms in the drum and neutralize the positive charges above. Black areas on the original sheet do not reflect light onto the drum, leaving regions of positive charges on the drum's surface.

Negatively charged then attract the black pigment called toner and then spread it over the surface of the drum, and the pigment particles of the positive charges remain. A positively charged sheet of paper then passes over the surface of the drum, attracting the beads of toner away from it.

After all the process is done the paper is then heated and pressed to fuse the image formed by the toner to the paper's surface. And this is how a photocopier works.

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