ALEXANDRIA, Va., Feb. 5 -- United States Patent no. 12,216,420, issued on Feb. 4, was assigned to Toshiba Tec K.K. (Tokyo).
"Image forming apparatus and control method" was invented by Masaya Tanaka (Sunto Shizuoka, Japan) and Hiroshi Ota (Ota Tokyo, Japan).
According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "An image forming apparatus has an image forming unit to form a toner image on a first sheet and a fixing unit configured to heat the first sheet to fix the image to the first sheet. A control unit begins a cooling process for cooling the fixing unit when an overheating condition is met, then permits the image forming unit to form a toner image on a second sheet after the cooling process ends according to a fir...