Enhanced physical and mechanical properties of resin added with aluminum oxyhydroxide for dental applications

Abstract

Resin has limited applications however, its composites with metal oxides exhibited improved characteristics for numerous applications such as dental restoration, dentures etc. Herein, various compositions were fabricated by substituted aluminum oxyhydroxide (AlOOH) into resin via a scalable heat cure process. For phase identification and structural study, XRD and FT-IR techniques were employed. As increasing the content of AlOOH into the PZ {Poly (methyl-methacrylate)-zirconia, (PMMA-ZrO2)} matrix, the percentage of crystallinity and the crystallite size were also estimated and varied from 14.8 to 18.4 and 1.48 nm–1.82 nm respectively. Moreover, to reveal the surface morphology, optical and mechanical behaviour of fabricated nano-composites, the SEM, UV–Vis and Universal testing machine (UTM) were also performed. The direct, indirect band gap, urbach energy of the fabricated composites were noticed within the range of 5.14 ± 0.005–5.19 ± 0.005 eV, 5.31 ± 0.005–5.35 ± 0.005 eV, and 189 ± 3.78–69.6 ± 1.39 eV respectively. The skin depth of the nanocomposites were also studied, the cut-off energy and cutoff-wavelength are 5.66 eV and 220 nm. However, the compressive strength, flexural strength, and the lowest friction coefficient value at 1 m/s sliding speed of the best composite sample (PZA15) are 85.2 MPa, 56.7 MPa and 0.311. The highest flexural modulus (846 MPa) of the PZA15 were determined using the 3-point bending test. Further, to check the biocompatibility of these resin-based composites the MTT assay was carried out. The synthesized composite (PZA15) was found to be highly biocompatible with enhanced mechanical and tribological performances.