Measurement of human enamel mechanical characteristics with resonant ultrasound spectroscopy

The measurement of enamel mechanical properties offers great significance for the design, development and evaluation of clinical dental restorative materials. In this paper, resonant ultrasound spectroscopy (RUS) was proposed to measure the full second-order elastic tensor of human enamel specimens, and the mechanical parameters of human enamel, including Young's moduli, shear moduli and Poisson's ratios, were further calculated, which ranged from 64.50 to 80.46 GPa, 26.63 to 51.86 GPa and 0.18 to 0.40, separately. This study demonstrates that RUS shows feasibility on measuring the mechanical properties of human enamel with repeatable and nondestructive advantages.