BIOPOLYMERS AS DOSIMETERS - A PROPOSAL

Abstract

The radiation study has led to advances in various areas of our everyday lives despite that several events had occurred, causing health damage to several researchers. Thus, if somebody wants to study irradiation effects on materials must use equipment that quantifies the radiation received. Dosimeters do this quantification of ionizing radiation. There are numerous applications for ionizing radiation so far, and many materials can be used for dosimetric purposes. Despite that, there is always a constant search for new materials, focusing on more efficient processes or less environmental impact. For dosimetric purposes, the material has to be radiation sensitive. Many materials have been the subject of research recently, aiming to be environment friendly: among them, we can mention biopolymers that have the great advantage of being biodegradable. A commercial solid-state dosimeter uses silver-activated phosphate glass for radiophotoluminescence (RPL) purposes. This dosimeter has an enormous advantage since it does not lose the dose information after dose reading. It can be reread many times until annealing is done to reset the exposure condition. It can be reused several times. This dosimeter is commercially available as “GD-450” (Chiyoda Technol Corporation). Our research group successfully proposed using silicate glass instead of phosphate glass as RPL dosimeters. Face to the need for a high-temperature furnace for glass sintering, and it was decided to test biopolymers as RPL dosimeters. Once our goal was to have a regenerative dosimeter, we used silver as a sensible radiation element. This work it was synthesized two biopolymers with and without adding silver to them. The biopolymers synthesized used starch and collagen as polymer base material. The biopolymers analysis was done by microscopy and by optical spectrometry (UV-Vis-NIR). We observed irradiation effects on absorption bands from biopolymer of collagen doped with silver.