A Year of Validations: Expanding Carbon’s Dental Resin Options
As 2024 wraps up, Carbon also wraps an aggressive, year-long schedule of validating seven new dental resins for use on Carbon printers. Drawing from customer requests, market trends, and discussions with resin manufacturers, we prioritized offering labs more options for aesthetics, reduced cost, and new applications. Carbon turned to trusted resin partners Pac-Dent, Flexcera, and Keystone to continue offering the top resins in the industry. In addition, Carbon formed new partnerships with two manufacturers who had never allowed their resins to be validated on a third-party printer before. Quality recognizes quality.
The Vital Validation Team
The whole validation process is designed to put our customers in a position to pick up the resin on the first day without all the trial and error configuring printer settings and part orientation and support strategy. Only resins that meet our consistency and reliability requirements are deemed “certified third-party resins” for Carbon printers. A cross-functional team, including a product manager, print development engineers, customer support, and education, works hard to validate each new resin. The team has spent over 550 hours on resin validation in the past year.
The product manager monitors customer feedback and market trends, and talks to third-party resin manufacturers about upcoming new resins to identify the best candidates for validation. Once the validation team chooses and prioritizes a material, they start by evaluating the liquid-level properties. They’re looking to validate viscosity, printing, and final cured properties and consistency from lot to lot. If a resin meets these criteria, the validation process moves to testing of the prints to answer the following questions about the resin:
- Does it meet the stated mechanical properties?
- Does it meet the stated biocompatibility standards?
- Does the accuracy of the print meet Carbon’s standards?
- What is the fastest speed this resin can print while maintaining high quality?
If the prints don’t meet standards the first time around, validation engineers often adjust the printing parameters and perform the validation process again. This process is about fine-tuning the printer configurations to ensure the certified resin will perform consistently from day 1. From here, the team sends printed samples to the third-party resin manufacturer to test and check against their specifications.
This process also drives Carbon’s orientation and support strategy to make our customers most successful. This part often takes the longest. The team tests various configurations through a CT scan to determine which configurations and settings produce the most accurate and repeatable results. By ensuring that all certified resins print seamlessly on a Carbon print, we eliminate the guesswork of printing for our customers.
To get a complete picture of how the resin performs and to ensure robustness, the team validates it on all available Carbon printer models, and on a wide range of hardware variations. All this becomes invaluable data the support team uses to troubleshoot customers issues.
Customers may be surprised to learn that Carbon runs beta-testing programs. Pre-validation data and feedback from our customer gathered during Beta programs, such as our Early Access Program, allows the validation team to understand how the new resin works in a lab environment. The beta testers identify pain points and the validation team explores ways to ease such pains. The team wants to make sure that they’ve thought of and tested everything so that each newly certified resin is a solution rather than something our customers need to spend time figuring out how to use.
The education team at Carbon takes all these findings and transforms them into a course, which includes recommendations on orientation and support configurations, print controls, and general tips for use with a Carbon printer based on our validation testing. The support team also reviews the results of the validation tests to ensure they can help Carbon customers as soon as the resin is certified.
During this recent push to validate more dental resins, the validation team has found ways to streamline the process for greater efficiency. For example, in some cases, it’s more efficient to have multiple validations in process at the same time. This improved process may be a little faster, but it still identifies and validates quality resins that are fully certified for use on Carbon printers. The end result is that customers will be able to pick up that validated resin on day 1 and print it successfully on their Carbon printers, and if they have any questions, there’s training ready to reference and a prepared support team to call.
The Magnificent Seven
The seven resins validated in the past 12 months include four for use in dentures, two for all-on-X, one for splints and nightguards, one for gingival masks, and one for sports mouthguards. The Keystone® KeyGuard™ resin is the first sports mouthguard resin validated for use on Carbon printers, so it opens up a new application opportunity for dental labs.
Table 1. New, validated dental resins and their applications.
| Resin | Dentures | All-on-X | Sportsmouth Guards |
Splints/ Nightguards |
Gingival Masks |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| KeyGuard (Keystone) | X | ||||
| Sprintray OnX Tough 2 | X | X | |||
| Flexcera Base Ultra+ | X | ||||
| KeyMask (Keystone) |
X | ||||
| SmileGuard (Desktop Health) |
X | ||||
| Rodin Sculpture (Pac-Dent) |
X | X | |||
| Flexcera Base | X |
Pac-Dent® Rodin® Sculpture resin is a game-changer in dental restorations. This resin is the first in Carbon’s resin portfolio that is FDA 510k-cleared for long-term provisional all-on-X appliances. This resin features an innovative nanohybrid ceramic formulation, ideal for high-strength, lifelike restorations.
Desktop Health™ Flexcera® Base resin provides Carbon labs with an additional denture system. Combining exceptional fracture resistance with minimal water sorption, this resin provides an economical and trusted option for your customers. Flexcera Base is FDA-cleared, ensuring quality and safety.
Keystone® Industries KeyGuard™ resin is innovative, flexible, and ideal for creating custom-fit, high-quality sports mouthguards. Custom mouthguard workflows leveraging Carbon and KeyGuard allow for digitally designed mouthguards to have variable wall thicknesses, ensuring both comfort and protection for the end user.
Desktop Health™ SmileGuard resin offers a combination of strength for high-impact resistance and a custom fit that maintains comfort for patients. FDA 510(k)-cleared, SmileGuard is validated for both regular cassettes and new AO Polishing Cassettes and designed to fit into the lab’s nightguard and splint workflows.
Keystone® KeyMask® resin can realistically simulate gum tissue, both in appearance and functionality. It offers unmatched precision and flexibility, which are crucial for creating natural-looking dental restorations. With features such as low shrinkage and optimal flexibility, KeyMask ensures a precise fit and enhances the aesthetic quality of your final product.
Desktop Health™ Flexcera® Base Ultra+ resin is innovative and combines durability, translucency, and strength, while providing the opportunity to make wall thicknesses as narrow as 2.5 mm. It is available in five lifelike shades, including a new pink shade, for natural-looking restorations.
SprintRay’s OnX Tough 2 resin is renowned for its fracture toughness, exceptional optical performance, and shade stability. It is the first and only 3D printing resin FDA-cleared for producing hybrid dentures and implant-retained prostheses.
Continuing Innovation
Customers have welcomed and adopted these new materials. In the past year, these seven new resins have been used for 4000 print hours on Carbon printers, and some of them have been available for only a few months.
In total, there are resins certified to print the following applications on Carbon printers (check out all the certified dental resins here):
- Artificial Teeth
- Permanent Full Crowns
- Permanent Partial Crowns
- Inlays and Onlays
- Temporary Bridges
- Permanent Veneers
- Dental Gingiva Masks
- Full Removable Dentures
- Monolithic Partial Removable Dentures
- Partial Denture Bases
- Sports Guards/Mouthguards
- Surgical Guides
- Try-In Dentures
- Nightguards
- Splints
- Repositioners
- Custom Bite Trays
- All-on-X Long-Term Provisionals
- Hybrid Dentures
- Removable Partial Burn-out Material
- Indirect Bonding Trays
- Orthodontic and Dental Models
Carbon will continue to listen to feedback and requests from its dental lab customers to ensure the materials available are relevant, high quality, and innovative. Stay tuned for more resin options in 2025 and beyond.
3D as It’s Meant to Be
Interested in utilizing Carbon to accelerate product development? Reach out to us at sales@carbon3d.com to learn more!