ABSTRACT
In recent years, the used of Additive Manufacturing (AM) techniques in the manufacturing of medical products have expended together with the advancement of technology. Nevertheless in dentistry area, denture components are still being produced manually and fabricated using conventional methods. The compression flask process is one of the examples which most commonly used in denture manufacturing. The process requires many steps and related to labor intensive work. The good quality of the complete denture was rated by prosthodontists at 2 to 6 months to be produced [1]. Besides that, information related to personalize denture cannot be retrieved and high skills personal are needed in wax carving and teeth arrangement, which depends mostly on the technician’s subjective judgment [2]. In addition, in the compression method, the material was not accurately estimated and some of the material will be treated as a waste. This gives a reason why this study is important in denture manufacturing research.The introduction of advanced manufacturing technologies (AMT) such as 3D scanning, CAD, Rapid tooling technique are able to make complicated, optimized material, customerspecific denture product more faster and accurate than the conventional process [3,4]. Rapid tooling describes those applications that are aimed at making tools and
moulds for the production of prototypes and pre-series products by using the same processes as those used in rapid prototyping (RP) [5]. The RT used in this process had classified as indirect tooling, in which a rapid prototype master is converted into a mould using a secondary process. Indirect tooling also had been classified based on their expected mold life as soft tooling and hard tooling [6]. Besides that the soft tooling method had been used in this study to produce soft moulds such as silicone rubber [6]. Vacuum casting process has been used to produce silicone moulds and denture fabrication.
