scanning electrochemical microscopy as a tool for the characterization of dental erosion扫描电化学显微镜作为一种工具的描述牙酸蚀病.pdfVIP

SAGE-Hindawi Access to Research International Journal of Electrochemistry Volume 2011, Article ID 952470, 6 pages doi:10.4061/2011/952470 Research Article Scanning Electrochemical Microscopy as a Tool for the Characterization of Dental Erosion Pollyana S. Castro,1 Alex S. Lima,1 Tiago L. Ferreira,2 and Mauro Bertotti1 1 Instituto de Quımica, Universidade de Sao Paulo (USP), 05508-900 Sao Paulo, SP, Brazil ´ ˜ ˜ 2 Instituto de Ciencias Ambientais, Quımicas e Farmaceuticas, Universidade Federal de Sao Paulo (UNIFESP), ˆ ´ ˆ ˜ Campus Diadema, 09972-270 Diadema, SP, Brazil Correspondence should be addressed to Mauro Bertotti, mbertott@iq.usp.br Received 9 February 2011; Accepted 11 March 2011 Academic Editor: Sibel A. Ozkan Copyright © 2011 Pollyana S. Castro et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. When the tooth is exposed to acidic environments, an irreversible loss of dental hard tissue occurs in a process called dental erosion. In this work, the scanning electrochemical microscopy (SECM) was used to probe the consumption of protons at the vicinity of a tooth surface with a platinum microelectrode fixed at −0.5 (V) versus Ag/AgCl/KCl(sat) . SECM approach curves were recorded to assess the extent of diffusion in the solution close to the tooth substrate. SECM images clearly demonstrated that the acid erosion process is very fast at solution pH values in the range between 3 and 4. 1. Introduction