Abstract
Dental resin composites (DRCs) with diverse fillers added are widely-used restorative materials to repair tooth defects. The addition of fillers brings an improvement in the mechanical properties of DRCs. In the past decade, diverse fillers have emerged. However, the change of emerging fillers mainly focuses on the chemical composition, while the morphologic characteristics changes are often ignored. The fillers with new morphologies not only have the advantages of traditional fillers (particles, fibrous filler, etc.), but also endow some additional functional characteristics (stronger bonding ability to resin matrix, polymerization resistance, and wear resistance, drug release control ability, etc.). Moreover, some new morphologies are closely related to the improvement of traditional fillers, porous filler vs. glass particles, core-sheath fibrous vs. fibrous, etc. Some other new morphology fillers are combinations of traditional fillers, UHA vs. HA particles and fibrous, tetrapod-like whisker vs. whisker and fibrous filler, mesoporous silica vs. porous and silica particles. In this review, we give an overall description and a preliminary summary of the fillers, as well as our perspectives on the future direction of the development of novel fillers for next-generation DRCs.
Highlights
Dental resin composites (DRCs) have become the most popular filling material in direct dental restorations while amalgam restorations have been gradually eliminated in clinical use due to negative effects, such as having a mismatched appearance with natural teeth, potential toxicity, and environmental pollution [1]
Despite some being derived from pre-existing particulate and fibrous fillers, the morphology and composition of novel-shaped fillers are beyond the boundaries of those for traditional fillers
Compared to those used over the last decade, the new fillers show an improved bonding ability to the resin matrix
Summary
Dental resin composites (DRCs) have become the most popular filling material in direct dental restorations while amalgam restorations have been gradually eliminated in clinical use due to negative effects, such as having a mismatched appearance with natural teeth, potential toxicity, and environmental pollution [1]. Even with the same chemical composition, there are dramatic differences in the final properties of DRCs with different morphologies of fillers, especially for some novel-shaped fillers reported in recent years, such as core-sheath structure fillers and tetrapod-like fillers [17,18,19,20,21,22,23]. We found that fillers with certain special morphological features could reduce polymerization shrinkage through their spatial structure [24]. This may lead to an important breakthrough in the development of future DRCs. studies on filler morphologies are scattered across individual studies, and a systematic review of fillers based on morphology appears to be absent. This category contains either derivatives of traditional morphologies for which it is difficult to accurately determined their aspect ratios, such as bionic sea urchins, or some novel morphologies similar to traditional ones in appearance but completely different in microstructure, such as microspheres with mesoporous, hollow, or core-sheath microstructures
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