ALGOR AROUND THE WORLD - Geneva, Switzerland
Swiss Engineers Analyze Dental Restorations and Prostheses

(Above) Eugene Labarre, from the University of the Pacific in San Francisco, and Jean-Marc Meyer, from the University of Geneva, School of Dentistry, display a dental attachment model prepared with the Algor Finite Element Analysis (FEA) System. The newly installed system is primarily used to analyze models of dental restorations and prostheses.

"With Algor's FEA System, we enter material properties directly into a model of a dental part," explains Meyer. "Then, clinical loading conditions are applied to the model. Analysis results help us better understand the causes of failure in dental parts such as clasps or attachments. Also, we can test the durability of different materials comprising dental parts.

"Our work is further improved by Algor's thermal analysis module. With it, we can determine the minimum thickness of a material that must be applied as thermal insulation under metallic dental restorations."