Electrospun nanofiber reinforcement of dental composites with electromagnetic alignment approach

Polymethylmethacrylate (PMMA) is commonly used as a base acrylic denture material with benefits of rapid and easy handling, however, when it is used in prosthetic dentistry, fracturing or cracking problems can be seen due to the relatively low strength issues. Besides, acrylic resin is the still prominent material for denture fabrication due to its handy and low cost features. Numerous proposed fillers that are used to produce PMMA composites, however electrospun polyvinylalcohol (PVA) nanofiber fillers for production of PMMA composite resins are not studied as much as the others. The other focus of the practice is to compare both mechanical properties and efficiency of aligned fibers versus non-aligned PVA nanofibers in PMMA based dental composites. Field-controlled electrospinning system is manufactured and provided good alignment in lab scale as one of contributions. Some novel auxiliary electrodes in controlled structure are augmented to obtain different patterns of alignment with a certain range of fiber diameters. Scanning electron microscopy is used for physical characterization to determine the range of fiber diameters. Non-woven fiber has no unique pattern due to chaotic nature of electrospinning process, but aligned fibers have round pattern or crossed lines. These produced fibers are structured as layer-by-layer form with different features, and these features are used in producing PMMA dental composites with different volume ratios. The maximum flexural strength figure shows that fiber load by weight of 0.25% w/w and above improves in the maximum level. As a result, mechanical properties of PMMA dental composites are improved by using PVA nanofibers as a filler, however the improvement was higher when aligned PVA nanofibers are used. The maximum values were 5.1 MPa (flexural strength), 0.8 GPa (elastic modulus), and 170 kJ/m(3) (toughness) in three-point bending test. In addition to the positive results of aligned and non-aligned nanofibers it was found that they both have a non-toxic feature.