Application
Application

Dental Crowns

A crown is a hollow replica of a tooth that covers damaged or decayed teeth to enhance their strength and improve their appearance.

The dentist smoothed the old tooth to fit the custom crown. Place crowns on polished/formed old teeth and glue them in place.

Traditionally, these crowns (or hats) were made of metal (e.g. gold/silver crowns). In modern times, these crowns have been replaced by CNC milling of solid ceramic ingots or ceramic composite resins..

Naturally, casting or milling with precious metals can be costly, time-consuming, and wasteful of materials, especially when subtractive manufacturing methods are used..

Lets compare AM crowns with the milled composite resin crowns.

Dental AM

As a highly customized crown, the dental industry soon heard about the benefits of additive manufacturing and fully accepted it..

In addition to highly customized parts, they are often produced in low volumes, which means that costs are often high.

Of course, since dentists adopted 3D printing technology, some changes have taken place. Now all kinds of printing dental equipment can be used by dentists who are willing to try AM.

For those who do this, this study validates their investment, because 3D printing dental crowns are not only more cost-effective than milling dental crowns, but also waste less materials, have fewer differences, and have higher dimensional accuracy.

The higher accuracy of 3D printing makes the wearer more suitable. The results showed that printed crowns were also less brittle, which could reduce the possibility of crown fragmentation.

The milled crowns show significant dimensional deviations, particularly at the cusps.

Some people are now interested in the overall fracture resistance and biocompatibility of printed crowns.

In the dental industry, not only is the crown a popular print. Other common orthodontic prints include bridge models, surgical guidelines, fixators, splints, castable restorations, and even printed dentures.

These components are typically manufactured using photopolymer resin systems that provide excellent precision and a range of material choices for medical applications.