Design and Manufacturing of a Functionally Graded Porous Dental Implant

Dental implants are a prosthesis for missing teeth that are made to match a natural tooth. Current dental implants experience a high risk of failure in patients that have diseases affecting the oral region. When the patient experiences one or more of these diseases, the interface between the bone and implant is compromised and patients can experience low success rates or insufficient remaining bone structure. The purpose of this research is to create a dental implant technology that is suitable for both healthy and unhealthy patients. In the solutions studied, inducing pores into the Ti6Al4V implant proved to mimic the material properties of natural bone resulting in enhanced osseointegration. We plan to create an innovative solution with enhanced osseointegration that will ensure a gradient in mechanical properties. The complex geometry of the pore-induced dental implant is manufactured using the additive manufacturing method of selective laser melting (SLM). In this research, a functionally graded porous disk was designed using lattice-like pores to mimic the structure of bone. Multiple samples were created with 50-micron pores and printing was studied to test the capabilities of the SLM machine and resolution of the samples. It was found that the parameters play a role in the print resolution of the design. Additional porosity was induced through a keyhole effect during selective melting process.