3D printing is a process of making three dimensional solid objects from a digital file. The Digital file itself comes from 3D scanners or 3D Impressions that I discussed in my last article.
How does 3D Printing work?
To make a crown and your implant starts from a virtual design of the object we want to make. this design is a CAD (Computer-Aided Design) file. CAD file created using a 3D modeling application or with a 3D scanner. The digital object Crown and your implant is divided into horizontal slices by the desired layer thickness and then created by laying down the sequential slide layers of material until the complete object is formed.
There are 3 types of 3D printing: Extrusion, Granular/ powder-based, and Light Polymerization.
3D printing takes the efficiencies of digital design to the production stage. By combining oral scanning, CAD/CAM design, and 3D printing, dental labs can accurately and rapidly produce crowns, bridges, stone models, a range of orthodontic appliances, even in surgery such as dental implants, manufacture of dental craniofacial and orthopedic implants, and the fabrication of copings and frameworks for implants and dental restorations. 3D printing can produce smaller feature sizes with no restriction on part geometry.
Joseph DeSimone, the CEO of the 3D printing company Carbon 3D and a professor of chemistry at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, announced that a breakthrough technology allows teeth to be printed in 6,5 minutes. It’s amazing! Going to the dentist will take a longer time on your ride than the chairside process itself!
Unfortunately, Only 10% of dentists use a CAD/CAM machine, however, even though the technology has been available for years. The learning curve can be steep, and most dentists still prefer to leave the work to skilled technicians in dental labs.
