INFLUENCE OF INITIAL FLAW SIZE ON CRACK-GROWTH IN AIR-TEMPERED PORCELAIN

Tempering of dental porcelain by forced convective cooling in air has been shown previously to inhibit the sizes of cracks induced in porcelain surfaces. However, the depth of compressive stress that is produced by tempering of feldspathic porcelain has not been determined. It can be assumed that the potential of tempered specimens to inhibit crack formation is reduced as the flaw size exceeds some critical value, since the compressive stress decreases with distance from the surface. The objective of this study was to test the hypothesis that the effectiveness of tempering stress in porcelain decreases with the increasing size of initial surface flaws. Body porcelain discs, 16 mm in diameter and 2 mm in thickness, were tempered (T) by forced convective cooling in air from an initial temperature of 982-degrees-C at a pressure of 0.34 MPa for 90 s. Non-tempered control discs (NT) were slowly cooled by termination of power to the furnace. The half crack-lengths (c) of surface cracks induced by a Vickers microhardness indenter at loads ranging from 2.0 to 39.2 N were determined initially and over a period of 24 h. The initial half crack-lengths, c(o), for the tempered specimens were significantly smaller (p < 0.05) than the corresponding values for the slow-cooled specimens. The mean value of the stress corrosion susceptibility coefficient (n), which is inversely related to the slope of log crack size vs. log time, was only slightly smaller for the NT specimen groups (15.3), compared with the mean value for the T groups (17.1). These results indicate that tempering stress can effectively inhibit the initial sizes of half-penny cracks with initial depths of at least 100-mu-m. However, in tempered specimens, the growth rate of initial cracks, which varied in length from 21.4-mu-m to 76.1-mu-m, was relatively insensitive to the compressive stress (78.1 MPa) produced by tempering.