Samueli School of Engineering

Abstract:  Currently, around 50% (~178 million) of all Americans are missing at least 1 tooth, with 12% (~40 million) of Americans missing all of their teeth. Dental implants are a common solution to this issue; titanium is the leading material of choice. Zirconia ceramic dental implants are a suitable replacement for titanium, but are often criticized for their brittleness. By developing a tantalum functional gradient coating, we hope to increase the viability of zirconia ceramic materials for dental implants. Two sets of material were chosen to test the proprietary BruxZir tantalum ion solution: yttria stabilized zirconia (3Y-TZP) and alumina toughened zirconia (ATZ). Solutions with varying concentrations of 0%, 10%, 15%, and 30% weight percent tantalum were prepared, and the ceramic samples were coated and sintered. Each sample was analyzed through various characterization methods, including SEM, EDS, XRD, nanoindentation, and Raman spectroscopy to observe how the solution impacted each sample’s microstructure and mechanical properties. Although our results are still in progress, we found evidence of an inverse relationship between tantalum concentration and grain size.