Natural Teeth and Bio-Inspired Dental Materials

Jing Du, Xinrui Niu, Nima Rahbar, Wole Soboyejo

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingChapter

Abstract

Dental restorations, including crowns, bridges, and implants, are designed to repair and restore damaged or missing teeth. All-ceramic restorations are widely used because of their biocompatibility and esthetics. However, their strength and fatigue life are not satisfactory and clinical complications including ceramic fracture and loss of retention are commonly observed. There are several choices of engineered materials for dental restorations. Ceramics are light and hard, but also brittle and fragile. Multilayered dental crown structures are subjected to contact loading due to occlusion and endure sub-surface stresses in the ceramic that can ultimately lead to sub-critical cracking in the ceramic and final failure of the whole multilayered structures. Such cracking is often aggravated by the mismatch and abrupt changes in the elastic properties from one layer to the other in the multilayers. Compared with manmade dental restorations, natural teeth exhibit superior mechanical resilience, including strength and durability, which can be attributed to the interpenetrating and graded microstructures and mechanical properties of the dental hard tissues and their interfaces, dentin-enamel junctions. The sophistication in the natural teeth provides the inspiration for the design and processing of layered structures with gradients. An adhesive layer that consists of functionally graded materials was designed and fabricated to mimic the dentin-enamel junction. It reduces the overall stress concentration in the dental multilayer structures and the stress level in the top ceramic layers and increases the critical loads of failure for the whole multilayered structures. Future work is needed to translate the bioinspired functionally graded multilayers to clinical applications and extend the concept to other dental restorations, such as implants and tissue-engineered structures.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationComprehensive Structural Integrity
PublisherElsevier
PagesV9-66-V9-89
ISBN (Electronic)9780323919456
DOIs
StatePublished - Jan 1 2023

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • General Engineering

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