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Simulating Toner and Carrier Particles in Electrophotography (Jun-Sep, 1998, Caltech) |
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Written by Administrator
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Friday, 09 March 2007 |
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This summer project, carried out under the guidance of Dr. Melany Hunt, attempted better understand the behavior of charged granular matter in response to various electric and magnetic fields. This research was funded in large part by a grant from Epson, and was therefore in the first line intended to aid the understanding of the flow of micro-sized toner particles in laser printers.
The code for a discrete-particle simulation, which basically just integrated contact forces between particles, needed to be improved to make the program run faster. The straightforward implementation of the electrostatic forces required a processing-demanding N^2 calculation. Grouping particles into clusters, which are then acted on by charge fields, improve the speed of the code by factors of 2 to 10, depending on particle and charge distribution. There were a lot of complications with this approach, though, and looking back on it, it was probably not the right way. It would have been better to approximate an electric field potential. Here is a short write-up of the results.
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Last Updated ( Thursday, 16 August 2007 )
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