Study of a thiol-ene/methacrylate system as dental restorative material with low shrinkage strain and acceptable mechanical properties

Despite of wide spread applications of methacrylate based restorative dental materials, this system still suffer from some shortcomings such as incomplete conversion of monomers andhigh shrinkage strain and stress. Thiol-ene systems that their photopolymerization proceeds through freeradical step growth polymerization mechanism have been introduced to overcome the methacrylate system problems. However, due to generation of flexible thioether linkagesduring photocrosslinking, their mechanical properties are inferior in comparison to pure methacrylate system. Combination of these two systems is a way to get rid of this deficiency [1-4]. In this study a urethane-based allyl ether monomer (UAEM) was introduced into a methacrylate resin system and mechanical properties and shrinkage strain of thiolene/ methacrylate was compared with the parent pure methacrylate formulation