[Criteria for choice of an alloy for dental amalgams]

Dental amalgam is still the safest and the most utilized posterior restorative material. The amalgam weakness is the marginal leakage of the filling. This defect is the main source of failure. Creep and corrosion are the most important factors in the marginal destruction mechanism. It's suitable to determine material properties before oral use. Electrochemical methods i.e. corrosion potentials and currents are mainly utilized. In vivo techniques have been developed. Those techniques give us interesting informations on amalgam buccal behaviour in course of time. Amalgam choice is very important: the best one is a High Copper alloy with high corrosion resistance and low creep.