Recent advances in design and preparation of bioceramic materials for manufacturing dental crowns by vat photopolymerization

The most durable and acceptable tooth-colored crown material should have good physical, and mechanical properties, chemical resistance, biocompatibility, and aesthetic behavior. The most common materials for artificial crowns are metals, polymers, and ceramics. Ceramics have better mechanical properties than polymers and better aesthetic properties than metals. Still, because of the ceramic excessive brittleness, it is not advisable to manufacture dental crowns by conventional manufacturing methods such as formative and subtractive due to some drawbacks in the previous types of manufacturing such as material wastage, and high complexity that conventional manufacturing methods can’t achieve. So additive manufacturing methods attract the interest of researchers in dental ceramics. The most common additive manufacturing method is vat photopolymerization in which ceramic slurry is accurately prepared and then introduced into a 3d printing machine under the control of the vat photopolymerization process performance parameters then the printed part is introduced into the heat treatment process then we characterize the manufactured part to conform its performance with the required properties of the product. Then cost analysis is done to estimate the cost of manufactured dental crowns. Overall, the design of dental crowns for manufacturing is helpful for dental manufacturers.