Ever notice the word 'Fluoride' on ur toothpastes?? Yes? no?
Check check!!

My FYP is all about fluoride.
It is a very powerful tool! It protects ur teeth from all the bogehness.

U see, when u eat sugary food, bacteria will use up these sugar on ur teeth to metabolize themselves! n they'll have this by-product namely acid.

Acid is a very very bad person. A destroyer. Ur teeth has an outer layer made out of minerals. This acid will "erode" away all these minerals. So if it keeps on eroding and eroding.. there u go! gigi berlobang!! cavities! tooth decay!

It can go as bad like this:




eww rite?

So before u let the bad acid destroy ur teeth! always always prevent the acid!!

how??

yes! fluoride!

thats how u prevent!
before it goes any deeper, the moment it erodes the first layer, fluoride will come in and adds back whatever minerals that had been lost.

So keep brushing ur teeth with fluoridated toothpaste to keep re-mineralizing ur teeth surface.
Oh, even our water source from paips is fluoridated! so do guggle each time after every meal.

Sometimes when its too late, u'll have to find a cure and u'll go to the dentist where he'll fill up the cavities with those grey fillings right?



What does these have to do with material science u ask?
Now Im not doing dentistry here.

Its the fillings that Im dealing about!
yes!

There many different fillings made from different materials!

If the usual ones u see grey.. now there's new ones that has the same tooth colour!



Now this, is applicable for chapped tooth too!
So u see, current materials not only brings out the aesthetics, it too has fluoride effects! Amazing huh.

The incorporated material actually keeps releasing fluoride to protect the already lobang-ed area.

My project is simple but tedious.

All we had to do was:
Measure how much fluoride the material releases.
We had a total of 4 materials that we compared and evaluated.

We made aritificial saliva too! my goodness, i tell u, the smell was worse than real one!

So these materials were dumped into the saliva over days.
After days, we checked the amount of fluoride contained inside the saliva.
And also, checked the pH level of the saliva. If it was going up towards neutral, it showed that the acid was vanishing.

U see, fluoride do wonders. Not only it adds up minerals to ur tooth, it'll also remove acidity!
Oh How much fluoride protects!




Making of material in procss:


This is the machine. The most important. Fluoride amount and pH were checked with this:


Ah.. materials being dumped inside saliva. We did other media too apart from saliva, to mimic our mouth when we eat or drink different things.



Measuring in process:




Oh dats all about it.

Ive beginning to appreciate my FYP =D

12/24/2007 11:56:00 pm;