A comparative study on investment casting of dental crowns for veterinary dentistry by using ABS patterns with and without wax coating

Abstract

The fused deposition modelling (FDM) assisted investment casting (IC) is one of the commercially established routes for fabrication of biomedical parts requiring high precision. In past two decades number of studies has been reported on use of thermoplastic and wax based FDM patterns for IC of dental crown (DC) in human dentistry. But hitherto little has been reported on comparison of Ni-Co-Cr based DC prepared by using FDM printed virgin acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS) pattern and wax coated ABS pattern for veterinary patients (VP). In this work, first molar and canine teeth in left side of lower mandible of a 3-year German Shepherd male dog has been prepared by using virgin ABS and wax coated ABS patterns followed by IC of Ni-Co-Cr alloy. The result of study suggests that wax coated ABS samples-based DC has better surface hardness, grain structure, surface roughness (Ra) and controlled surface porosity thus may be used as commercial manufacturing strategy. The results have been supported with scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and energy dispersive X-ray (EDX) analysis.