Structural, thermal, optical features and shielding parameters investigations of optical glasses for gamma radiation shielding and defense applications

To design new radiation shielding materials instead of conventional materials such as concrete with improved performance in gamma-ray shielding in nuclear reactors, defense applications, and medical sciences, very recently, there exists an increasing interest among researchers. For this purpose, heavy metal oxides based optical glasses attracted much attention, nowadays. In this work, five glass samples with nominal composition of (70-x)B2O3-5SiO2-5TeO2-10ZnO-10Li2O-xBaO (where x = 5, 10, 15, 20, and 25 mol%) were fabricated by melt quenching technique. The structural and thermal studies were carried out using XRD, SEM/EDAX, FTIR, Raman, and TGA/DSC measurements. Different shielding parameters such as mass attenuation coefficients, effective atomic number, mean free path and exposure buildup factor have been calculated in order to investigate the effectiveness of using the prepared glasses as radiation shielding materials. The half-value layer of the prepared glasses has been compared to different types of concretes. The results of shielding properties indicate that addition of BaO significantly enhances shielding capability of the prepared glasses against gamma radiation.