Integration of CAD/CAM in developing the CNC dental wire bending machine

摘要

This paper describes the idea of adopting CNC wire bending technology into dentistry wire bending. Till recently, the dentistry wire bending is traditionally performed in the hand-made operation. Innovations in the field of archwire bending in orthodontics have been reported which use robots to execute the desired wire bending operation. In contrast, CNC wire bending technology has not been successfully explored. In this regard, the manufacturing workflow which integrates CAD/CAM into the system is proposed. In addition, several interfaces to execute the bend points planning for different cases are introduced. The B-code generation program, which automatically converts the XYZ Cartesian coordinates for each bend point into the desired theoretical wire bending parameters (L, 𝛽, θ) has been developed with no consideration of the material properties. The feasibility of this methodology is demonstrated through an example, starting from the bend points planning, follows by the XYZ coordinates extraction and ends with the B-code generation. Moreover, the graphical simulation of the wire bending operation by the designed mechanism is also presented.