Thermo-mechanical finite element analyses in 3-D models are described for determination of the stress levels due to thermal and mechanical loads in a healthy and restored tooth. Transient thermo-mechanical analysis simulating the ingestion of cold and hot drinks was performed to determine the temperature distribution in the models of the teeth, followed by linear elastic stress analyses. The thermal loads were applied on the occlusal and lingual surfaces. Subsequently, coupled variation of the temperature and mastication loading was considered. The vertical loading was distributed at occlusal points, adding up to 180 N. Maximum stresses were verified in resin restoration under thermal loads. When studying coupled effect of mechanical loading with that arising from thermal effects, higher tensile stress values occurred in porcelain restorations, especially at the restoration-dentin interface. Regions of high tensile stress were detected and their possible clinical significance with respect to restoration damage and microleakage were discussed.

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Some numerical remarks regarding the crack evolution in failure analysis by the BEM using cells with embedded strong discontinuities are addressed in this work. A comparative study between the generation of these cells at any iteration or only after a step convergence is firstly performed. Moreover, an analysis is carried out related to the cells size growth throughout the iterative-incremental process. As reference, some classical problems whose experimental results are available in the literature are used for the numerical analysis which is performed considering the implicit formulation of the boundary element method together with the continuum strong discontinuity approach. It was verified that the results are coincident for different numbers of steps considered in the simulations when cells are generated during any iteration, showing step size independence in this case, while the same is not true for the case of cells generated only after step convergence, in which a large number of steps are required for a good accuracy. Finally, it is shown that a small increase in cell size throughout the analysis contributes to the reduction in numerical processing time without significantly affecting the results accuracy.

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