Durable Dental Drills

By introducing fine-grained diamond powder into the tool bundle, it was possible to increase the wear resistance of burs by 20%. Dental burs are most often used by orthopaedic dentists and dental technicians in clinics and laboratories. These rotary tools are designed to process the contact surfaces of the tissues of the prosthetic bed and the prosthesis itself. The new tools can better withstand high loads and the repeated exposure to high temperatures caused by sterilisation after each use, and therefore last longer.

Our own Professor Vladimir Chuev, who is also a director of VladMiVa, explained that the durability of orthopaedic instruments is affected by shape and size, and a combination of two technological factors, namely, the size and concentration of diamond grains, and the properties of the binder that holds them together.

“When cutting with diamond tools, heat is released, which significantly reduces the operational characteristics of the metal bond where it joins the diamond grain. This effect occurs due to the different thermal conductivity of the binder and diamond grains, as diamond has the highest thermal conductivity of any material. Therefore, as part of the experiment, we introduced a diamond powder with a grain size of 63–50 μm, which, when in contact with large grains, contributes to the temperature redistribution into a batch of standard burs of coarse (160–125 μm) and super-coarse (220–160 μm) granularities.”

The wear time of standard tools is 10 minutes. The new hybrid burs will be able to provide consistently high quality processing of the supporting tooth tissue and the applied prosthesis for 12 minutes. The redistribution of high temperatures in the process of preparing for prosthetics, will prevent burns to the pulp of the abutment tooth, and, in the laboratory stage, avoid deformation of the thin parts of the prostheses. Two minutes of additional equipment operation time is also a cost saving.

The article in Russian is available here.