Abstract
NiTi wires are considered as the most appropriate wires to be used during the initial phase of orthodontic treatment. This work presents a numerical method to simulate the coupling between the orthodontic appliance and bone remodeling, which are the two mechanisms responsible for the orthodontic tooth movement.
The superelastic behavior of a NiTi wire was integrated in a three-dimensional simulation model to reproduce the long-term bone remodeling coupled with tooth alignment using the finite element method. The orthodontic load was derived by deforming the superelastic wire in order to adopt itself to the original position of irregular teeth. Root form was extracted from cone beam tomography imaging files.
As a result, the teeth were aligned while the wire was recovering its initial shape. The canine was intruded by 0.53 mm, while the neighboring teeth were extruded by 0.44 and 0.46 mm. When the wire was loaded, it generated a load of 4.6 N on the bracket bonded on the canine. This force was active during the first day of the treatment. Then, the force continued to decline until the end of the correction period. The decreasing load delivered from the wire affected the teeth displacements as observed in real situations.
Despite the complexity of the presented numerical simulation, this procedure allowed the analysis of the orthodontic forces that were generated in the clinical experiments and of the biomechanical response of the periodontal support elements when using this kind of wire.