Currently, dental implants are widely used as artificial teeth due to their good chewing performance and long life cycle. Generally, a dental implant consists of an abutment as the upper part and a fixture as the lower part. When chewing forces are repeatedly applied to a dental implant, a gap is often generated at the interfacial surface between the abutment and the fixture, and it results in some deterioration such as loosening of the fastening screw, dental retraction and fixture fracture. To enhance the sealing performance for coping with such problems, this study proposes a new sealing-type abutment having a number of grooves along the conical surface circumference, and it carries out finite element analysis in consideration of the external chewing force and pretension between the abutment and the fixture. The result shows that the proposed sealing-type abutment shows an enhanced sealing performance in terms of the contact pressure in comparison with a conventional abutment.
