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Dentists frequently use dental composites, often referred to as “white fillings”, to restore decayed teeth. Nevertheless, a major issue in their use is the risk of composite restorations fracturing due to the formation of microcracks. In fact, approximately 25% of the replacements are caused by such composite fractures.
Researchers at the Department of Dentistry of Radboudumc (Ke Ning, Fang Yang, Bas Loomans and Sander Leeuwenburgh) previously developed novel self-healing composite restorations capable of repairing cracks autonomously. They achieved this by incorporating microcapsules containing a healing liquid into these composites, which effectively stopped crack growth by releasing the healing liquid into growing cracks. They confirmed that these dental composites were self-healing under static conditions, but these static measurements unfortunately do not correspond to the cyclic loading dental composites undergo during mastication.
Therefore, the research team at the Dept. of Dentistry recently tested the long-term fatigue performance of these self-healing composites. They used both traditional bending tests and advanced aging protocols in a custom-designed chewing simulator, replicating oral aging under physiologically relevant conditions. The results indicate that self-healing dental composites containing microcapsules were weakened by the incorporation of microcapsules and the creation of air bubbles during the mixing procedure. Therefore, future studies on self-healing resin-based composites should aim for a more efficient method to incorporate microcapsules without introducing air bubbles/voids. Nevertheless, the novel self-healing composites containing microcapsules exhibited enhanced long-term fatigue performance under in vitro conditions compared to conventional dental composites without microcapsules. These results confirm the strong potential of self-healing dental composites for application in restorative dentistry.
Figure 1: Design of self-healing dental composite based on incorporation of microcapsules containing healing liquid
Read the study here
Ning K, Yang F, Bronkhorst E, Ruben J, Nogueira L, Haugen H, Loomans B, Leeuwenburgh S. Fatigue behaviour of a self-healing dental composite. Dent Mater. 2023 Oct;39(10):913-921. doi: 10.1016/j.dental.2023.08.172. Epub 2023 Aug 27.
