Gamma-ray attenuation properties of polymer biomaterials: Experiment, XCOM and GAMOS results

Abstract

This study aims to compute and measure the linear attenuation coefficients of two biomaterials used in the human body as synthetic materials. These are used as bone cement and have applications in contact lens production and dentistry (coded as P1) also glass ionomer cement is a frequently preferred material in restorative dentistry applications (coded as P2). In the computational part of the study, a mono-energetic photon source between 1 keV and 20 MeV was used in the simulations performed using the GAMOS 6.2 program. In the experimental part, the linear attenuation coefficients of polymer materials were measured by using different radioactive sources at 6 different certain energies ranging from 511 to 1332 keV. A gamma spectrometer consisting of a NaI (Tl) detector was used for this purpose. Using the XCOM code, the experimental and simulation results were compared to the theoretical results, and a very good agreement was found between them. The simulation results demonstrated that the Monte Carlo technique can be used as an alternative to calculating the mass attenuation coefficients at the desired gamma energy, particularly for physically difficult to produce samples.