Coating of Additive Manufactured Dental Suprastructures and its Interaction with Veneering Resin

Abstract: This study has investigated the possibilities of coating additive manufactured titanium dental prosthesis structures. Different coating alternatives were evaluated with the regards of esthetics, function and implementation possibilities. The coatings were applied on test samples and the adhesion between the printed titanium structures and the coating as well as to resin veneering applied on top was tested. The coating methods that were evaluated were anodization, plasma electrolytic oxidation, physical vapor deposition, sol-gel as well as a conventional opaque resin coating. A so called Charpy test was conducted to evaluate if the different coatings affected the material strength, however the method proved unsatisfactory to study any differences caused by the coatings. The surface roughness was also tested for coated and non-coated samples. The possibility of implementing the coating at Dentsply were investigated by evaluating economic and technical aspects of the different coating methods. The shear bond test showed that the conventional method of opaque manual coating resulted in the highest bond strength, with anodization and plasma electrolytic oxidation being the second best. This study concluded that producing a large scale automated industrial method for coating titanium prosthetics before resin veneering poses several challenges. Although this thesis has put ground work into screening different available coatings, more development is needed in order to present an implementable solution.