Resin design goals: low viscosity, toughness, low shrinkage, boil resistance, deformation resistance, compliant with FDA certification requirements.
Background: Invisible aligner products have been validated and widely used in developed economies such as Europe and the United States for many years. The traditional preparation method mainly involves 3D printing resin dental molds followed by vacuum forming, which is cumbersome and generates a large amount of dental mold waste, making it inefficient and not compliant with current carbon footprint requirements. Directly printing aligners has become the optimal choice. Therefore, the industry has raised higher requirements for printing resins used for direct molding, which has become an unavoidable threshold.
Conventional PUA resins generally have very high viscosities due to various factors such as hydrogen bonding, molecular weight, and intermolecular entanglement, with viscosities of over one hundred thousand being common. As a result, they are often used in conjunction with a large amount of small molecular monomers to reduce viscosity. These monomers cannot all be converted during the photopolymerization process, and the residual monomers are difficult to remove from the cured material, making it challenging to ensure their cytotoxicity is safe. Therefore, a pure resin that does not require monomers has become the ideal choice for 3D printing resins for invisible aligners.
Resin 3413 is a two-component PUA resin optimized for physical properties, pure and free of any monomers. As mentioned at the beginning, its viscosity is only around four thousand, with a hardness of approximately Shore D85, hard yet not brittle, and it maintains its physical properties even after boiling for two hours. It has a transparent blue appearance, making it very suitable for certification-required dental 3D printing materials.
