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The use of dental implants of titanium and its alloys has proved to be effective, through well established and documented parameters, both in the dimensions and in the manufacturing processes and also in the surgical techniques. There are clinical situations where there is a need to reduce the diameter of the implants, below 3.75 mm in diameter. In the current state of art of the implant technology it is desirable that these also have surfaces capable of decreasing the period of osseointegration. In the present work, to improve the mechanical strength of the material, an alloy of 80% of Ti and 20% of Zr % in mass was proposed and elaborated, aiming its use as biomaterial. Physical, chemical, microstructural and mechanical characterization was carried out. The surfaces of the treated samples were observed using: scanning electron microscopy (SEM); semi quantitatively chemically analyzed using dispersive energy spectroscopy (EDS: wettability of the samples was determined and, finally, the roughness was measured using optical profilometry. For the conditions used in the present work, it was concluded, that the best surface treatment for the TiZr 80/20 alloy was acid etching with 1% vol. hydrofluoric acid for 5 minutes, as this treatment presented the most prominent results of wettability and roughness simultaneously.

This paper presents the initial developments of a prototype device intended to perform measurements of the fastening torque in the range bellow 1 N.m – hereby denominated microtorque. The device is intended to yield data for analysis of in vitro torquing and detorquing experiments, for fixation and removing of abutments in dental implants and implants in artificial bones. The analysis of the data acquired allowed the authors to observe characteristic fingerprints or signal signatures associated to the type of abutment or implant under experimentation as well as of the mechanical prototype characteristics. In this paper, two different systems of abutment and implant were analyzed. The correlation between the phenomena associated to the signal fingerprints indicate that the developed measurement protocol may be extended to other implant / abutment systems. The authors suggest that the insertion and removal torque curves evaluated in this study would facilitated the correlation between the abutments stability in actual patients and the dynamical behavior under masticatory function.