Development of CAE technology for 3D printing of titanium alloy dental prosthesis

Abstract

Medical device such as implant is one of the promising applications of additive manufacturing by selective laser melting of titanium or titanium alloy powder. The additive manufacturing and the support by CAE for dental prosthesis are studied in this paper, highlighting on the quality assurance and the robust design because variability exists due to the manufacturing process. The stiffness of the dental prosthesis is one of the important design factors, which is requested to be within certain range. Therefore, the maximum stiffness and the minimum one are both predicted in addition to the averaged or expected value. Starting from the static tensile test using dumbbell-shaped specimens to build up the elasto-plastic material model considering variability, this paper presents the micro-CT image-based FEA of two types of prostheses. The difference in the positioning on the powder bed during additive manufacturing led to approximately 15% difference for Young’s modulus and 9% difference for yield stress and ultimate stress of the titanium alloy, Ti-6Al-4V, whose influences were discussed.