Gelcast Zirconia Ceramics With High Strength and Simultaneously High Translucency for Dental Applications

Abstract

Translucent zirconia represents a favourite material for monolithic ceramic dental restorations. However, materials approaches employed so far to improve the translucency of zirconia ceramics are accompanied by a significant decline in strength. Thus, we aimed to develop dental 3Y-TZP ceramics that can provide excellent strength and, simultaneously, enhanced translucency. In this investigation, machinable tetragonal zirconia ceramics based on fine mesostructured zirconia particles stabilized with 3 mol% of yttria and prepared by the gelcasting processing method were developed. Properties of sintered samples were characterised, namely: shrinkage, density, structure, surface roughness, hardness, biaxial strength, and total forward transmittance. Zirconia ceramics with an average biaxial strength of 1184 MPa and a total forward transmittance of 46.7% for a 0.5 mm thick sample at a wavelength of 600 nm were obtained. These ceramics exhibited homogeneous structure with grains sizes up to 620 nm and purely tetragonal phase composition. The developed ceramics provided a favourable combination of high translucency comparable even with the mixed cubic/tetragonal structure of a common 4Y-TZP, and very high strength that is achievable only in the pure tetragonal 3Y-TZP.