Light-curing composite filling
Total bonding
The most up to date solution to restore heavily injured, decayed teeth or enamel defects is the light –curing composite filling material/ total bonding that provides an ideal mechanical and esthetic solution. This is why the treatment carried out with the help of this technology is called tooth restoration.
A common disadvantage of all the pre-exsisting filling materials was that they needed to be fixed mechanically in the cavity. It wasn’t enough to simply eliminate the decayed material, a part of the heathy tooth substance also needed to be removed in order to provide an anchorage for the filling. When using total bonding, there is no need to sacrifice the healthy tooth substance by milling since this technology creates a very strong chemical bond (instead of a mechanical one) between the tooth and the filling.
Besides this, the sixth generation of light-curing fillings is also characterized by a high level of:- abrasion resistance
- pressure resistance
- tensile strength
Unlike amalgam pluggers, which meant the patient had to content with black or in a more fortunate case silver colour spots on the teeth, the light-curing composites match the teeth perfectly in colour and remain almost invisible.
Synthetic (composite) resin strengthened by nanometrical specks of glass and porcelain: As a result of a given frequency of ultra violet radiation, the soft compound mass becomes polymerized and gets solid. The solidity of the filling equals to that of the enamel.
As one of the greatest advantages of the UV filling is its excellent esthetic quality, it is widely used to restore front teeth. The insertion of an insulating layer between the tooth and the filling is essential because its lack may lead to dental necrosis. After removing the decayed parts, the surface of the tooth is cleansed by a special type of acid where it contacts the filling. The bond is then adhered onto this microscopically rough surface. The bond gets a few seconds of polymerization by ultra violet radiation and finally the filling material is put in the cavity. If the cavity is too deep it is safer to fill the cavity in several layers. This type of filling is often called porcelain filling, which is not accurate since it is in fact an acrylic resin.
