A New Method Combining Finite Element Analysis and Digital Image Correlation to Assess Macroscopic Mechanical Properties of Dentin

A literature review points out a large discrepancy in the results of the mechanical tests on dentin that can be explained by stress and strain assessment during the tests. Errors in these assessments during mechanical tests can lead to inaccurate estimation of the mechanical properties of the tested material. On top of that, using the beam theory to analyze the bending test for thick specimens will increase these experimental errors. After summarizing the results of mechanical tests on dentin in the literature, we focus on bending tests and compare the stress assessment obtained by finite element analysis (FEA) and by beam theory application. We show that the difference between the two methods can be quite large in some cases, leading us to prefer the use of FEA to assess stresses. We then propose a new method based on coupling finite element analysis and digital image correlation (DIC) to more accurately evaluate stress distributions, strain distributions and elastic modulus in the case of a three-point bending test. To illustrate and prove the feasibility of the method, it is applied on a dentinal sample so that mean elastic modulus and maximum tensile stress are obtained (11.9 GPa and 143.9 MPa). Note that the main purpose of this study is to focus on the method itself, and not to provide new mechanical values for dentin. When used in standard mechanical testing of dentin, this kind of method should help to narrow the range of obtained mechanical properties values.