Bringing AM to the UK’s largest dental show

Last month, we headed to the NEC, Birmingham to exhibit at the UK’s largest dental event — The British Dental Conference & Dentistry Show. This was a great opportunity for us to continue raising awareness of how additive manufacturing (AM) can transform dental part production and support applications including crown and bridge, orthodontics and implantology.

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By Amish Jani, ?Stratasys sales specialist at Tri-Tech 3D

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At the NEC, visitors were greeted by over 400 exhibitors including well-known suppliers like Skillbond and John Winters, and orthodontic specialists such as DB Orthodontics and Ormco. In Hall 5 on Stand G16, we exhibited the J5 DentaJet — the newest addition to the Stratasys dental family.

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The J5 DentaJet uses multi-material unattended printing and minimal post-processing to increase output while producing higher-quality dental parts. PolyJet 3D printing technology delivers key advantages for different dental applications, such as extreme accuracy for implantology cases. It also offers best-in-class aesthetics for removables and realistic colour models. Therefore, once TrueDent?, a new high-fidelity polychromatic dental appliance resin, becomes available to customers, they can produce various high-volume, mixed-tray printing and full-colour monolithic dentures.

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Bringing AM to the mainstream in dental laboratories

Many dental professionals now see AM as a credible manufacturing option alongside traditional methods of fabrication.

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At the show, we wanted to demonstrate that AM can be a viable option for dental labs that want to produce dentures and prosthetics on an industrial scale — as an alternative to conventional processes. For example. by having the J5 DentaJet on the stand — a multi-material system that offers single mixed-tray prints — ?we could show visitors the system can produce large volumes of high-quality crown and bridge models with fewer remakes than with competitive systems.

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The future of dental production

Dental laboratories rely on producing appliances, such as models, crowns and surgical guides, quickly — and this is where AM’s strengths lie. Using 3D scanning, dentists can quickly take accurate images of the patient’s mouth and immediately email them to the laboratory so that technicians upload and convert the scan into a computer aided design (CAD) file. Once designed, they can use a resin 3D printer to create the part layer by layer in a few hours, or even minutes.

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We expect to see more dental labs bring additive systems into their workflow, so we wanted to demonstrate that Tri-Tech 3D can provide the technology that will help service the market. The event helped us raise awareness and interest in AM technology, laying the foundations for the industry’s digital future.

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If you missed us at the show but are interested in finding out more about AM for dental part production, contact our team to find out more about 3D printing in healthcare.

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