Measurement of the elastic modulus of dental pieces

Understanding the mechanical properties of human teeth is important to clinical tooth preparation and to the development of restorative materials. Particularly, the elastic modulus of materials used in restoration of dental parts subjected to endodontic treatment must be compatible with the original tooth. The major difficulty to measure mechanical properties of biological materials is, in general, the geometry of the specimen. Actually, even when there are different methodologies to determine the elastic modulus, samples with flat and parallel faces of uniform section are usually required. Dental parts not only do not fulfil this condition, but also constitute a composite material formed essentially by enamel and dentin with quite different elastic moduli. In this work the elastic moduli of canine and pre-molar teeth, measured by using piezoelectric excitation at high frequency, are presented. The measuring procedure considers the tooth as a composite, that is, gives a mean value according to the complex distribution of enamel and dentin in the different cross-sections of the specimen. Results are compared with Young’s modulus of enamel and dentin obtained by indentation techniques.