An in vitro Evaluation of friction characteristics of conventional stainless steel and self-ligating stainless steel brackets with different dimensions of archwires in various Bracket-archwire combination

Aim: The purpose of this research is to compare the frictional attributes of stainless steel conventional brackets and selfligating stainless steel brackets with different dimensions of archwires. Materials and methods: The test was carried with two sets of maxillary brackets: (1) Conventional stainless steel (Victory Series), (2) stainless steel self-ligating (SmartClip) without first premolar brackets. Stainless steel, nickel-titanium (NiTi), and beta-Ti which are the types of orthodontic wire alloys were tested in this study. To monitor the frictional force, a universal testing machine (Instron 33R 4467) that comprises 10 kg tension load cell was assigned on a range of 1 kg and determined from 0 to 2 kg, which allows moving of an archwire along the brackets. One-way analysis of variance was used to test the difference between groups. To analyze the statistical difference between the two groups, Student's t-test was used. Results: For Victory Series in static friction, p-value was 0.946 and for kinetic friction it was 0.944; at the same time for SmartClip, the p value for static and kinetic frictional resistance was 0.497 and 0.518 respectively. Hence, there was no statistically significant difference between the NiTi and stainless steel archwires. Conclusion: It is concluded that when compared with conventional brackets with stainless steel ligatures, self-ligating brackets can produce significantly less friction during sliding. Beta-Ti archwires expressed high amount of frictional resistance and the stainless steel archwires comprise low frictional resistance among all the archwire materials.