STTR Phase II: Solid Freeform Fabrication Based Dental Reconstruction

This Small Business Technology Transfer Phase II project will develop and optimize the Rapid Freeze Prototyping (RFP) technology, producing ice patterns used in investment casting to fabricate dental castings for crowns, bridges, implant-retailed restorations and other prostheses, as well as to integrate the developed RFP technology with commercial digital imaging and computer-aided design technologies into an Internet CAD/CAM dental restoration system. The commercial and broader impacts of this project will be to provide a significant time and cost savings using the patented RFP technology compared with the hand-crafted process of pattern making currently used by the vast majority of dental laboratories. Hundreds of thousands of dental castings are made each year by hand. The high labor cost of making these castings makes the dental market ideal for the application of the proposed RFP technology and other allied CAD/CAM technologies.