Parametric analysis of the influence of texture on human dental surface hardness.

Tooth wear is one of the dental abnormalities commonly found in different populations. The objective of this work is to conduct a parametric analysis to evaluate the texture influence on the human dental surface hardness, considered here as the ratio between contact force and contact area, obtained through homogenization procedure. A code was implemented using the statistical package R for parametric analysis. The computational approach consists of three routines: numerical generation of surfaces, based on Pearson system; the second, a script coupled to the Finite Element program Abaqus, for the modelling of the micro-contacts; the third for homogenization and statistical analysis of results. The average curvature of the roughness exerts the greatest influence on the surface hardness. The parameters that most influence the development of contact forces are kurtosis followed by skewness.