Vistasp Karbhari has a job any playful child would love. A professor
of structural engineering, he breaks things for a living. He and
his colleagues at UC San Diego’s Jacobs School of Engineering
use mammoth machines to bend, pummel, pound and shake man-made structures.
Their goal is to understand how roads, buildings and bridges break,
then use that knowledge to better reinforce those structures against
earthquakes, bomb blasts and other assaults.
But it was bridges of another kind that recently caught Karbhari’s
attention—dental bridges. An expert in applying fiber-reinforced
polymer composites as strong, lightweight materials for aerospace,
automotive and other industrial applications, Karbhari is now using
polyethylene fibers, of the type used in bullet-proof vests, in dental
composites.
Dentists use fibers in dental composites as part of restorations,
crowns and bridges, and Karbhari recently measured the toughness
and resistance to breakage of three types of fiber-reinforced dental
composites.
In a paper published in Dental Materials, Karbhari
reported that braided polyethylene fibers performed the best, boosting
toughness
by up to 433 percent compared to the composite alone. It adds
a whole new dimension to the old catch-a-bullet-in-your-teeth
act. 
Contributors to Making Waves: Mario Aguilera, '89, Rex Graham, Raymond Hardie, Debra Kain, Daniel B. Kane, Kim McDonald
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