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A small revolution in the fabrication of dental prosthetics occurred recently: Sirona Dental Systems' InfiniDent service began manufacturing them directly out of metal, saving technicians a lot of messy and tedious work.
The process uses direct metal laser sintering (DMLS) technology from EOS GmbH to fabricate the metal framework of a bridge with up to six teeth from a specially-developed cobalt-chrome alloy (inCoris NP). The starting point is a three-dimensional scan of a plaster casting of the patient's dental impression. The data set created from this is massaged by specialized software and subsequently sent to InfinDent's fabrication center over the Internet. Once several hundred coping and bridge framework data sets are collected and checked, they're fabricated in a batch by the EOS machine in just a few hours.
The whole process takes just three days from start to finish and the building time of an individual crown works out to only three minutes. A single machine can make 80,000 or more units per year with great consistency, and at a cost of only about US$25 each. This contrasts sharply with the manual process which permits a trained technician to make only about ten crowns in an entire workday.
It's no longer necessary for technicians to mount, embed, cast, deflask or spend much time cleaning the molded product. The frameworks emerge from the machine at full density and ready to be veneered with ceramic after very little finishing. The slight roughness of the sintered parts also works to good advantage in this application improving the adhesion of the ceramic.
This is an excellent example of a rapid manufacturing application having a perfect fit with the method's advantages: Individualized complex parts need to be made quickly in a specialized material and in substantial quantity. Nothing else will do that.
 Sirono with inEos 3D scanner. |
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It also illustrates how the development of additive fabrication materials and machinery are intertwined. EOS says that stainless steel has also been recently introduced for their laser sintering process, and titanium will follow in early 2007. As capabilities improve for strength, temperature resistance and accuracy, so too will the number of applications that can be addressed.
Download a detailed, four page white paper from EOS GmbH (166K) ...
Learn about laser sintering technology ...
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