Printing of Titanium implant prototype

Dental implant plays an important role as a conduit of force and stress to flow from the tooth to the related bone. In the load sharing between an implant and its related bone, the amount of stress carried by each of them directly related to their stiffness or modulus. Hence, it is a crucial issue for the implant to have matching mechanical properties, in particular modulus, between the implant and its related bone.Titanium is a metallic material that has good biocompatibility and corrosion resistance. Whilst the modulus of the bulk material is still higher than that of bone, it is the lowest among all other commonly used metallic implant materials, such as stainless steel or cobalt alloy. Hence it is potential to further reduce the modulus of pure Titanium by engineering its processing method to obtain porous structure.In this project, porous Titanium implant prototype is fabricated using 3-dimensional printing. This technique allows the flexibility of design customization, which is beneficial for implant fabrication as tailoring of implant size and shape helps to ensure the implant would fit nicely to the patient. The fabricated Titanium prototype had a modulus of 4.8—13.2 GPa, which is in the range of natural bone modulus. The compressive strength achieved was between 167 to 455 MPa. Subsequent cell culture study indicated that the porous Titanium prototype had good biocompatibility and is suitable for bone cell attachment and proliferation.