Monitoring the stress build-up in dental cements: a novel optical characterization technique

It is well known that during the curing of dental cements, polymerization shrinkage induces unacceptable stresses, which can result into cracks and an over-sensitivity of the teeth. We demonstrate that polarimetric optical fiber sensors can be used to characterize this shrinkage quantitatively. To determine the time evolution and the amount of shrinkage we embed a highly birefringent optical fiber in the dental cement and analyze the change in optical polarization at its output. This change is a measure for the dynamic stress-build up. We also demonstrate the repeatability of our characterization method for these cements. Moreover we given indications that this technique allows for in- vivo monitoring of the stress build-up dynamics between dentine and porcelain facings. This may bring durable all-ceramic restorations closer to reality. In this paper we present the principle of this original optical fiber sensor, its practical implementation and the experimental results we obtained for this application.