What’s the biggest fear in office copiers? Paper jams! And 90% of paper jams stem from the "transfer roller"—the rubber shaft responsible for precisely delivering toner onto paper. Traditional polyurethane sponge tubes degrade and shed debris in just three months, leaving black spots on printed pages. Now, a 5-gram "silicone cotton candy" tube is quietly taking over, running 300,000 pages without shedding a single particle.

The secret lies in room-temperature foamable liquid silicone. It works like baking a cake: Components A and B are mixed in a 1:1 ratio, expanding fourfold in 20 minutes to form a uniformly porous structure with a density of just 0.25 g/cm³—half the weight of traditional sponge tubes. Yet, it withstands temperatures up to 300°C, treating the 200°C heat waves in the toner melting zone as nothing more than a "sauna session."

"The most noticeable change is the noise level," says a test by an office equipment maintenance company. After replacing the roller with the silicone sponge tube, the noise from paper feeding dropped from 58 dB to 51 dB—equivalent to switching from a bustling office to a quiet library. Employees remarked, "We no longer have to cover our ears while photocopying."

The longevity data is even more impressive: ordinary sponge rollers wear out after 100,000 pages, while silicone rollers easily handle 300,000 pages, tripling their lifespan. This significantly reduces replacement frequency for maintenance personnel, saving customers ¥320 per machine annually on consumables. For the 2 million copiers nationwide, this could prevent 600 tons of discarded rubber tubes each year.

Additionally, the foam silicone’s rebound curve is gentle, allowing it to adapt to paper weights ranging from 60–300 g/㎡—handling everything from thick cardstock to thin rice paper. An anti-static formulation version offers a surface resistance of 10⁷ Ω, preventing toner adhesion and delivering cleaner prints.

From office environments to industrial printing, from home photo printers to large-scale engineering plotters, this "cotton candy" tube is ensuring that paper moves more steadily, quietly, and durably. It turns out that lightness can also be a form of productivity.