ABSTRACT

Throughout the years, the health of the mouth and the smile have gain an increasing importance, due to the fact that is one of the most important communication skills of a person. Yet, dental implant treatments offers a solution that may generate more satisfactory outcomes for patients who are not able to adapt to conventional dentures or who have already compromised local host bone. In this work, advanced discretization numerical techniques were used, more specifically, the Natural Neighbor Radial Point Interpolation Method (NNRPIM) and the Radial Point Interpolation Method (RPIM), and also the Finite Element Method (FEM). The main goal of this work is to understand the mechanical behavior of zirconia implants and the bone response in the presence of such implants and also, compare the three numerical methods used in this work, FEM, RPIM and NNRPIM. The results obtained show that meshless methods are capable to produce more accurate and smooth displacement and stress fields when compared to finite element technique.