New Material to Replace Extracted Human Teeth for Dental Research
A wide range of dental research has been conducted, such as evaluating dental ceramic materials for crown restoration on teeth and testing dentine analog materials in laboratory-based mechanical and fatigue tests. However, collecting and using extracted human teeth is becoming increasingly difficult, given concerns about COVID-19, size-standardization issues, and time constraints.
A research team led by Dr. James Tsoi, Associate Professor in Dental Materials Science from the Faculty of Dentistry at the University of Hong Kong (HKU), together with colleagues from Wuhan University, China, and Drexel University, USA, investigated new elliptical frustums of fiber-reinforced composite materials and compared their properties to those of human dentine. The study entitled “Which dentine analog material can replace human dentine for the crown fatigue test?” has been published online in Dental Materials.
The materials were tested for mechanical strength, elastic modulus, indentation hardness, and fatigue behavior. Fatigue behavior indicates the tenacity of the material under varying loads.
The researchers uniformly fabricated the new dentine analog materials with specific sizes and shapes to mimic natural teeth, adhesively bonded them to lithium disilicate crowns, and subjected them to fatigue loading—the restorations showed comparable fatigue failure load and lifetime (durability) to those based on extracted human teeth.
In addition, finite element analysis, an important method to simulate a physical phenomenon using a numerical technique, also showed promising results. For example, similar stress levels and distributions were observed between dentine analog materials and extracted human teeth.
“This study evaluated the mechanical properties and fatigue behavior of dentine analog materials experimentally, analytically, and numerically, and found that a material with spectacular size and shape can reliably replace human dentine as the substrate in a ceramic crown fatigue test,” said the principal investigator Dr. James Tsoi.
