Effects of fissure length and angle on the fracture modes of 3D printed teeth model: Insights from DIC-based fracture tests and meshless numerical simulations

To investigate the influences of teeth fissure properties on their failure modes, 3D Printing technology is used to prepare the teeth models. The strain distributions of the teeth model surfaces at each moment of the loading processes are obtained by the DIC technique. And the progressive failure processes as well as the stress distributions of the teeth models are simulated by the improved Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) Method. Experimental results show that under the action of the steel ball, the teeth models mainly produce two types of cracks: The tensile cracks along the pre-existing fissures and the shear cracks along both sides of the teeth model. The existence of prefabricated fissures greatly reduces the peak strength of the teeth models. Compared with the circumstances containing no pre-existing fissures, the peak strength of d = 1cm, d = 2cm and d = 3cm decreases by 22.33%, 31.79% and 18.94%, respectively, and the peak strength of θ = 30°, θ = 45°, θ = 60° decreases by 10.78%, 44.01% and 34.3%, respectively. Numerical results show that the initiations of tensile cracks are induced by the high tensile stress concentrations at the pre-existing fissure tips, while the shear cracks are caused by the high tensile stress concentrations in the low tensile stress concentration areas after the initiation of tensile cracks. The research results can provide some references for the understandings of teeth failure mechanisms as well as the applications of SPH method into teeth crack propagation simulations.