Rugometric and microtopographic non-invasive inspection in dental-resin composites and zirconia ceramics

Abstract

Surface properties are essential for a complete characterization of biomaterials. In restorative dentistry, the study of the surface properties of materials meant to replace dental tissues in an irreversibly diseased tooth is important to avoid harmful changes in future treatments. We have experimentally analyzed the surface characterization parameters of two different types of dental-resin composites and pre-sintered and sintered zirconia ceramics. We studied two shades of both composite types and two sintered zirconia ceramics: colored and uncolored. Moreover, a surface treatment was applied to one specimen of each dental-resin. All the samples were submitted to rugometric and microtopographic non-invasive inspection with the MICROTOP.06.MFC laser microtopographer in order to gather meaningful statistical parameters such as the average roughness ( R a ), the root-mean-square deviation ( R q ), the skewness ( R sk ), and the kurtosis of the surface height distribution ( R ku ). For a comparison of the different biomaterials, the uncertainties associated to the surface parameters were also determined. With respect to R a and R q , significant differences between the composite shades were found. Among the dental resins, the nanocomposite presented the highest values and, for the zirconia ceramics, the pre-sintered sample registered the lowest ones. The composite performance may have been due to cluster-formation variations. Except for the composites with the surface treatment, the sample surfaces had approximately a normal distribution of heights. The surface treatment applied to the composites increased the average roughness and moved the height distribution farther away from the normal distribution. The zirconia-sintering process resulted in higher average roughness without affecting the height distribution.