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US 11,958,248 B2Granted
Components with geometrical features to facilitate post-fabrication cleaning
AssigneeAlign Technology, Inc.
InventorsPeter Dorfinger, Siobhan O'Leary, Yan Chen, Zhou Yu, Jun Sato
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Abstract
The present application relates to components, such as dental apparatuses, having geometrical features to facilitate post-fabrication cleaning, including methods of fabricating the same. In one embodiment, a dental apparatus, such as a retainer, an aligner, or a dental attachment placement appliance, comprises one or more concave surfaces for which one or more apertures is formed therethrough at or near a maximum depth of a given concave surface.
Claims14
A method of forming a dental apparatus, the method comprising:
- fabricating the dental apparatus from a resin using an additive fabrication process, wherein the dental apparatus comprises:
- a body shaped to contact and conform to at least a portion of a dental arch;
- and
- one or more concave surfaces disposed along the body, wherein at least one of the one or more of the concave surfaces comprises an aperture formed therethrough, wherein at least one of the concave surfaces comprising an aperture further comprises at least one channel formed therein that is radially oriented with respect to the aperture, and wherein the at least one channel facilitates flow of residual resin toward the aperture;
- and
- centrifuging the dental apparatus using parameters sufficient to remove the residual resin from surfaces of the dental apparatus resulting from the additive fabrication process, wherein each aperture provides a flow path for the residual resin during the centrifugation so as to reduce or eliminate pooling of the residual resin on a respective concave surface of the dental apparatus.
3 more elements
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.