Cleaning and cooling teeth while preventing COVID-19 cross-infection
Cleaning and cooling teeth while preventing COVID-19 cross-infection lead image
Airborne diseases like COVID-19 can spread during dental procedures, which aerosolize the water used to clean and cool a patient’s teeth into the surrounding environment. Kim et al. introduced a new method to prevent liquid aerosolization during dental procedures by using polymer solutions instead of water.
The authors found that solutions containing polyacrylic acid, polyethylene glycol, or polyvinylpyrrolidone can efficiently clean and cool teeth to dental standards when they are used as irrigating fluids in dental procedures like cavitron scaling. These polymer solutions also prevent aerosolization due to their high elongational viscosity, and they remain pumpable. Less aerosols are produced as polymer concentration in such a viscoelastic solution increases, and complete aerosolization suppression is possible.
“Applying the viscoelastic polymer solution to a dental scaler is very easy. In many dental chairs, a bottle of irrigation fluid (water) is already used,” co-author Sam Yoon said. “A bottle of viscoelastic polymer solution could be used instead. Shear viscosity of such polymer solutions is relatively low, and thus, its pumping to the cavitron scaler is still relatively easy. Therefore, such an easy and effective aerosol suppression method can be commercialized easily enough.”
The team first measured the solutions’ physical properties — in particular, shear viscosity and viscoelasticity — and found the optimal parameters. Then, they measured the suppression of aerosols by visualizing the spray produced by a dental procedure for different weight concentrations and by measuring the distribution of droplet sizes (if any) produced by the solutions when supplied at a constant rate during a scaling procedure.
The researchers plan to investigate FDA-approved polymers so the solutions can be used in the dental industry.
Source: “Effect of polymer viscosity and viscoelasticity on tooth cooling and aerosolization during dental procedures,” by Yong Il Kim, Seongpil An, Jungwoo Huh, Jihye Heo, Jaehyung Lim, In-Seok Song, Alexander L. Yarin, and Sam S. Yoon, Physics of Fluids (2023). The article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0136286 .
