Continuous movement of teeth during the orthodontic treatment is simulated by using the finite elment method. Traditional expectation of a tooth movement is made based on the stresses on the periodontal ligaments. In this research, the long-term movem...
Continuous movement of teeth during the orthodontic treatment is simulated by using the finite elment method. Traditional expectation of a tooth movement is made based on the stresses on the periodontal ligaments. In this research, the long-term movement of teeth is simulated by continuously considering the deformation of the orthodontic system. To this end, the total treatment period is split into many small time steps, during each of which the permanent deformation of teeth is calculated in proportion to the instantaneous deformation of the teeth. In terms of the finite element analysis, when the current time step is changed to the next time step, the finite element model of the next time step is rebuilt by updating the spatial positions of the nodes of the current time step, which is performed by adding the current node positions and the corresponding displacements of the current time step.