Investigation of radiation shielding properties in BaO–PbO2–B2O3–Y2O3 under Eu-152 radiation

Abstract

This work investigates the radiation shielding properties of newly developed borate doped glasses incorporating varying contents of BaO, PbO2 and Y2O3. The prepared glasses' radiation shielding properties were investigated in the 0.0359–1.46 MeV energy range, which corresponds to the Eu-152 source-emitted energies. At 0.0359 MeV, the free Y2O3 glass sample's mass attenuation coefficient (MAC) is 10.475 cm2/g, while it is 11.958 cm2/g for the glass with 3 mol% Y2O3, indicating that the MAC increases with the increment in Y2O3 content. All the prepared glasses' MACs show a strong radiation energy dependence, with the MAC being high at the low energy range and small at the high energy range. The prepared glasses' linear attenuation coefficient (LAC) results demonstrated that BaO, PbO2 and Y2O3 addition causes improved radiation shielding performance. The LAC is also affected by the photon energy, where the LAC between 0.0395 and 0.122 MeV decreases by a factor of 7.9 for the free-Y2O3 glass sample, while it decreases by a factor of 8.09, 8.2, and 8.4 for the glasses with 1, 2, and 3 mol% Y2O3. The effective atomic number (Zeff) results showed that the 26BaO–18PbO2–55B2O3–3Y2O3 composed glass has a higher atomic number then the other prepared glasses and accordingly has better radiation shielding ability than the remaining glasses in this work.