Design and development of dental ceramics: Examples of current innovations and future concepts

Ceramics for restorative dentistry should satisfy some major requirements: biocompatibility, esthetic properties, and mechanical performance, to ensure proper reliability and lifetime to the dental devices. By keeping in mind such requirements and related applications, this chapter aims to provide some guidelines for the design and development of innovative ceramics for the next generation of dental products and to indicate the direction for future developments. Three main strategies are illustrated here concerning the design of new dental restorative materials. The first strategy focuses on strong, tough, and stable zirconia-based ceramics, needed for dental parts and implants subjected to the highest stresses. The second is the biomimetic approach, in which the design of dental ceramics is inspired by the human tooth architecture and functions. Functionally graded ceramics as well as mineralized tissue-based hierarchical structures have recently been designed and developed to this aim. The third ambitious strategy relates to tissue engineering in dentistry, showing the most recent advances for regenerating the whole-tooth complex in a biological manner.