What is Zirconia?

Zirconium, once an obscure element, gained significance in nuclear engineering during the late 1940s as an engineering material used to produce power. A very hard and brittle metal, zirconium resists hydrofluoric acid attacks easily and remains corrosion resistant over time.

Dental ceramics made of zirconia are increasingly preferred as crowns, bridges, and implants due to their strength and biocompatibility. Furthermore, its low wear characteristics and smooth surface texture also make this material appealing as cutting blades.

What is Zirconia?

Zirconia is an non-metal material widely used for dental crowns, bridges and implants due to its strength, durability and biocompatibility. Additionally, zirconia is popularly used as raw material in hip, finger and ear prostheses due to its longevity, strength and aesthetic qualities.

Zirconia crowns look more natural than metal crowns and are stronger and longer-lasting than PFM (porcelain fused to metal) crowns; Zirconia can last up to 20 years depending on individual dental care habits and lifestyle choices.

Zirconia dental implants are an ideal option, as it mimic the look and feel of natural teeth more closely than titanium ones, while being more durable than porcelain or titanium ones that may crack or chip under stress. However, longevity studies on zirconia still need to be conducted, and improper craftsmanship could result in increased wear on opposing teeth causing increased wear over time. It’s recommended that regular visits be scheduled with your dentist and proper cleaning performed on zirconia implants to maintain good oral health and longetivity.

Zirconia is a ceramic

Zirconia is an excellent ceramic material specifically developed for medical and dental applications. It boasts excellent mechanical properties that enable it to withstand stress, wear, corrosion, as well as being an insulator with low thermal conductivity – perfect for biocompatible bone implants!

Zirconia can be produced through a process known as calcination, in which different compounds of zirconium are heated to high temperatures without oxygen or air present in order to remove impurities and prepare the material for subsequent manufacturing processes.

Zirconia can be sintered using various techniques, including cold and electric field sintering. Cold sintering involves mixing powdered zirconia with liquid that promotes particle rearrangement and interdiffusion, while electric field sintering uses an electric current to help densification processes. Both approaches have the capability of lowering temperatures down below 300o C – though zirconia may become subject to low-temperature aging degradation (LTAD), caused by phase transformation.

Zirconia is a material

Zirconia is an outstanding ceramic material with exceptional mechanical properties such as strength, biocompatibility and hardness. This makes it the go-to material for dental prosthetics such as crowns, bridges and implants; in addition to multiple other uses.

Zirconium oxide can be produced using various processes, but one of the most popular is electric field sintering. This technique involves placing green material in an electric field until it flashes – an event which dramatically decreases its sintering temperature.

YTZP (yttria partially stabilized) zirconia can be colored using various impurities to produce appealing shades of blue, pink and green. Furthermore, it can also be tailored for specific technical functions, such as oxygen sensing or inclusion into composite materials like ZTA (zirconia toughened alumina).

Zirconia is an ideal material for load bearing applications, such as valve seals, bushings, pump parts and cutting tools. Due to its low thermal conductivity it can withstand high temperatures with ease.

Zirconia is a dental material

Zirconia is widely used in dentistry for crowns and veneers due to its superior mechanical properties – including higher fracture toughness than porcelain and metal-ceramics – as well as superior flexural strength and hardness properties. Furthermore, zirconia resists low temperature degradation. Unfortunately, however, it lacks the translucent quality found in lithium disilicate or enamel materials.

Zirconia has quickly become one of the go-to materials for dental restorations, thanks to its superior biocompatibility over gold. Furthermore, it’s more affordable than traditional gold restorations while looking much more natural than porcelain crowns.

Zirconia has long been available as a raw material, but only recently gained in popularity as production technology facilitated using CAD/CAM was refined. Zirconia boasts many advantages over other materials including wear resistance and withstanding forces caused by chewing and biting; making it particularly suitable for backmost molars which take extra pressure and may crack other restorations.