ABSTRACT
Y-TZP zirconia is widely used in the manufacture of coping as a structural material for dental prosthesis due to its opaque white/pearl color and mechanical strength. Dentures are made by machining with cam (computer aided manufacturing) software support, from pressed and pre-sintered blocks. Pre-sintering consists of heating the compressed blocks to high temperatures, with a slow heating rate until the neck formation among particles, when this provides hardness/strength and machinability. There is a contradiction, because the mechanical hardness/strength is necessary to provide stability to the cutting forces, but if it is very hard, machining can be difficult, therefore must be found a compromise zone of temperature between stability and machinability. In this way, the purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between microhardness and the pre-sintering temperature of experimental Y-TZP zirconia and its behavior to be subjected to machining. The microharness testing was chosen as representative of mechanical strength once it is nondestructive and with immediate result. The experimental zirconia powder was subjected to uniaxial pressing, subsequently cold isostatic pressing of 200 MPa and pre-sintering between 900°C and 950°C. Blocks were cut and subjected to machining stability testing and vickers microhardnes testing which the data were subjected to the anderson-darlin (p > 0.05) test for “normality”. Anova's “one way” with tukey-kramer test was used to verify the differences among the means of groups. The investigation showed that the difference of 50°C in pre-sintering temperature above 900°C significantly affect the hardness, whereas 2 to 4 hour time did not significantly affect material microhardness. The highest pre-sintering temperature of the tested experimental groups enabled better performance in machining with cam software support, which provides similar microhardness to commercial ZL material.
Keywords:
Y-TZP; copings; pre-sintering; microhardness; machining; CAD/CAM
