Dental composites have improved significantly in physical properties over the past few decades. However, polymerization shrinkage and stress is still the major drawback of composites, limiting its use to selected cases. Much effort has been made to make low shrinking composites to overcome this issue and silorane-based composites have recently been introduced into the market.

The aim of this study was to measure the volumetric polymerization shrinkage kinetics of a silorane-based composite and compare it with conventional methacrylate-based composites in order to evaluate its effectiveness in reducing polymerization shrinkage.

Five commercial methacrylate-based (Beautifil, Z100, Z250, Z350 and Gradia X) and a silorane-based (P90) composites were investigated. The volumetric change of the composites during light polymerization was detected continuously as buoyancy change in distilled water by means of Archemedes'principle, using a newly made volume shrinkage measurement instrument. The null hypothesis was that there were no differences in polymerization shrinkage, peak polymerization shrinkage rate and peak shrinkage time between the silorane-based composite and methacrylate-based composites. The results were as follows:

The shrinkage of silorane-based (P90) composites was the lowest (1.48%), and that of Beautifil composite was the highest (2.80%). There were also significant differences between brands among the methacrylate-based composites.