Our consciousness
toward environment and safety of merchandises
is increasing more than ever. Fuji Xerox contemplates
that material technology is needed to bring
out excellent physical properties for products
and taking safety and environmental burden into
consideration.
One of the technologies
is environment-conscious flame-retardant plastic
technology. Hitherto, flame-retardant plastic
technology has had a high environmental burden.
Therefore, we plan to establish plastic technology
that allows us to make safety and environment-consciousness
compatible.
Moreover, we
are paying attention to biomass plastic technology,
as one for coping with problems like reduction
of CO2
emission and oil resource depletion. Biomass
plastics are produced from vegetative raw materials.
So, it ensures us to get raw materials continuously.
Besides, biomass plastics do not emit CO2
more than the amount they have taken in. Therfore,
total amount of CO2
does not increase. For biomass plastics to be
used for our products, excellent performance
as plastics is required. In order to satisfy
these requirements, we are propelling research
and development of environment-conscious plastic
technology energetically.
Nano-composite flame-retardant technology
The surface of resin is densely covered with the
nano-particles when the resin burns, because nano-sized
flame-retardant particles are dispersed in the resin
homogeneously. This has an effect of containing
flame, by blocking flammable products generated
from the decomposed resin.
This technology gives flam-retardant characteristics
to plastics using safer inorganic materials than
bromic or phosphoric materials, which are usually
used to synthesize current flame-retardant plastics.
Fig. Structure of nano-sized flame-retardant particles
Fig. Relationship between heat generation speed
and combustion time
Biomass plastic technology
Polylactic acid is well known as a biomass plastic.
In order to use it for commercial products like
chassis of a copy machine, it is necessary to improve
various physical properties considerably. Especially,
it is very difficult to make mechanical strength
and flame-retardant characteristics compatible.
Therefore, we are endeavoring to develop excellent
biomass plastics, taking advantage of nano-composite
flame-retardant technology.
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