Ulrich Lohbauer - Dental Ceramics: Fracture Mechanics and Engineering Design

This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG

The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Are there enough books about ceramics and glass-ceramics out there? Is there a sufficient number of books on the mechanics of fracture of brittle materials already available or do we need more? What about those subjects focused specifically on the discipline of prosthetic dentistry? Is the information collected in those books, updated? Is there room for new perspectives and new approaches to addressing the topic of the mechanics of fracture in dental ceramics, at all?

When we got confronted with the above questions, the decision to write this book fell heavily on the latter, despite the answers to most of them being dismissive of any need for yet another book on dental ceramics.

Our rationale here is to provide a dualistic perspectiveyet not necessarily antitheticalon the fracture behavior of dental ceramics under several aspects: theory and practice, laboratorial and clinical, stability and failure. We go about it, for starters, offering some materials science background on the chemistry, synthesis, processing, and microstructure of dental ceramics and their relationships to the mechanical properties as assessed in a laboratorial setting, using the principles laid out by modern fracture mechanics. We confine the depth to modern, more clinically relevant materials, and forego on describing those that were once important, but that find increasingly fewer application in todays clinical practice.

Although undergraduate students of dental medicine and even dentists might find good use of much information contained herein, our main target audience was aimed to be the young researcher, that person who, as we once did, chose to take the path of academia, branching off from a typical career in the dental practice or in the industry, to pursue a profession oriented toward research and transfer of knowledge, both sedimented in a scientific concept. For that reason, we dedicate some space for digging into some of the fundamentals of mechanical testing and methodological approaches for determining material properties within a mechanistic framework.

In the last part of this book, we step out of the lab, yet not leaving the fundamentals of mechanics behind, to address the failure of dental ceramic constructs from the perspective of the forensic fractographer. By seizing on the richness of information that a clinically fractured prosthetic piece can offer on the fracture event, one can objectively address aspects of engineering design to reduce undesirable structural weaknesses and stress concentrations, thus guiding the way toward maximizing service lifetime. For that we employ the vast experience gathered in years of collaborative work in fractography courses and lessons learned from constant exchanges with renowned professionals and academics in the field of mechanical engineering.

We hope this book can generate some fresh perspectives on old problems and provide the reader with a basis for insights in materials development, a deeper understanding of mechanical concepts and incite the taste for accurate testing.

Our scientific path up to the point of writing this book has been filled with extremely fruitful exchange of ideas with uncountable number of scientists in the field of dentistry and engineering, from whom we have learned a lot through informal talks and project collaborations. Our special appreciation for valuable insights and teamwork over the years must include the names of Susanne Scherrer, George Quinn, and Claus Mattheck. We also thank Achim Gre for his extensive help in producing much of the artwork in this book.