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Design of dental crowns using glass fiber composites : a finite element study on the effect of fiber orientation

University of British Columbia

Ceramic-based materials are currently a popular choice for fabricating dental crowns, owing to their aesthetics and cost advantages, even though they occasionally show failures due to their brittle nature. Recently, the glass fiber dental composites (GFDCs) with polymeric resins have drawn interest of researchers and dental labs as a replacement for traditional crown materials, owing to the expected superior wear resistance, aesthetic properties as well as the ability to customize mechanical properties of the manufactured crown in desired loading directions. The current, commercially available GFDCs mostly have the fibers parallel to horizontal plane-X with respect to the teeth loading directions, and there is limited study to understand the effect of fiber orientation in optimizing performance of such crowns. In addition, the past in-vitro and in-vivo studies on dentistry materials lack a level of consistency in the applied loading and boundary conditions for modeling and validation. This study aims at a finite element-based comparative analysis of natural and series of artificial dental implants supported by a single incisor crown, in order to understand the load distributions and stress concentration patterns at different material configurations. Namely, an artificial crown was analyzed for both ceramic and a typical GFDC with three different fiber orientations. The 3D numerical models were subjected to 100N loading on four different faces of the tooth, at four different fiber angles. It was observed that the higher loading faces with respect to the tip of the crown and higher loading angles are mainly responsible for the highest mechanical stresses in the crown, regardless of the material configuration. However, the ceramic crowns generated higher stresses in the assembly compared to the natural tooth, whereas the use of GFDC in the crown showed a favorable outcome; i.e. much closer to the natural tooth, especially when it was covered with a veneering layer of porcelain and when the fibers were oriented along the tooth long axis.

Text

2019-07-15

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/70994

Mechanical Engineering

University of British Columbia

UBCO

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/