TRI BOLOGICAL STUDIES OF LAYERED BIOMATERIALS
FOR PROSTHETIC STRUCTURES BASED ON SUBSTRUCTURES
MADE OF DIGITAL TECHNOLOGIES
Modern dental prosthetics uses CAD/CAM in the Computer Aided Design (CAD) of substructures and its Computer Aided Manufacturing (CAM) process. The substructure is subject to appropriate veneering, which determines the functional cooperation. The aim of this study is to investigate the friction coefficient and wear resistance of the veneering layers of the substructures of prosthetic structures. The test materials are dedicated veneering layers on substructures made of factory-made CoCr, TiCP, and Ti6Al4V metal fittings as well as the glass-ceramic material LiSi2 and the ceramic ZrO2. The study was conducted on a Roxana Machine Works tribological machine in the ball-and-3discs system in an artificial saliva environment using a Hitachi S3400 scanning microscope. As a reference biomaterial, enamel-dentin discs were used. The tribological processes that take place under chewing conditions in the presence of saliva depend on the properties and technological parameters of the surface layer of the biomaterial wearing out and on the enamel of opposing teeth in contact, which also wears out. They should reproduce the physiological nature of adjustment wear in the stomatognathic system (SS). The determined values of the friction coefficient and wear resistance allowed differences to be indicated in the course of tribological processes, and microscopic analyses confirmed them.