Abstract
Background: Hardness is considered an important parameter for evaluating the clinical performance of dental implant bone drills. It is connected to the chemical composition, microstructure conformation and manufacture of the surgical drills. Methods: Microstructure of five dental implant drills using scanning electronic microscopy (SEM) integrated with energy dispersive X-ray spectrometry. Vickers microhardness was measured using a CV 2000 microhardness tester with an indentation force of 500 g. Results: Composition of the implant drills was typical of martensitic stainless steel (MSS). The drills contained 13%–17% of Cr; Mo, Si and Mn were present as minor ligands. The examined bone drills showed different external surface conformation and hardness in relation to the different industrial production processes. A rougher external surface and a higher hardness value are characteristics of the surgical bone drills produced by hot forming; the implant drills produced by machining showed mailing lines on their external surface and a lower hardness. Conclusions: Different compositions and treatments were used by the manufacturers to improve the hardness of the external layer of the dental implant drills making them prone to a diverse heat generation during the implant site preparation.
Highlights
The success of dental implant therapy depends on many factors, several of which are influenced by the surgical technique used [1,2,3]
Many authors have sought to identify factors that minimize the damage during implant site preparation, but there is no general agreement on the mechanical modeling of this process to determine optimum drill design and drill
Extension of the necrotic zone around the preparation site is considered proportional to the amount of heat generated by surgical drills during osteotomy, which can be related to different factors: (i) Operator, (ii) manufacturer, (iii) implant site and (iv) patient [2,3,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19]
Summary
Different compositions and treatments were used by the manufacturers to improve the hardness of the external layer of the dental implant drills making them prone to a diverse heat generation during the implant site preparation.
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