Fracture-free surfaces of CAD/CAM lithium metasilicate glass-ceramic using micro-slurry jet erosion

This paper reports the use of micro-slurry jet erosion (MSJE) on CAD/CAM lithium mesilicate glass ceramic (LMGC) that is capable of achieving the fracture-free surface quality. A computer-controlled MSJE process using a low-pressure and low-concentration alumina slurry was applied to diamond-ground LMGC surfaces with surface and subsurface damage. The MSJE processed and diamond-ground LMGC surfaces were examined using scanning electron microscopy (SEM) to examine surface morphology, fractures, and residual defects. 3D confocal laser microscopy (CLM) was used to quantitatively characterize all machined surface textures as a function of processing conditions. Our results show that surface and subsurface damage induced in diamond-ground surfaces were significantly diminished after 50-cycle MSJE processing. Fracture-free surfaces were obtained after 100 MSJE cycles. Our measured parameters of the 3D surface topography included the average surface roughness, maximum peak-valley height, highest peak height, lowest valley height, and kurtosis and absolute skewness of height distributions. All these parameters were significantly reduced with the increase of MSJE cycles. This work implies that MSJE promises to be an effective manufacturing technique for the generation of fracture-free LMGC surfaces which are crucial for high-quality monolithic restorations made from the material.