The dental enamel is the unique biological material, which is ideally adopted to resist mechanical loads. Moreover, the mechanical properties of enamel differ not only in the different layers of the latter, but also at the different surfaces and different parts of the tooth crown. It is suggested that such phenomenon can be explained by the anisotropy of the internal structure of the enamel, particularly by the differences in the arrangement of enamel rods.
The aim of the current research is to measure the microhardness values of the dental enamel in the different regions of the crown of the human permanent molar tooth, which are characterized by the different patterns of the enamel rods pathways.
The correlations between the pathways of the enamel rods and the mechanical behavior of the tooth enamel were estimated. The zones of the crown characterized by the arc-shape pathways of the enamel rods demonstrated notably higher microhardness values that those characterized by the straight-line pathways of the rods. It means that the arc-shaped pathway of the enamel rods contributes to the higher values of the enamel microhardness.