Influence of iron (III) oxide on the optical, mechanical, physical, and radiation shielding properties of sodium-barium-vanadate glass system

Abstract

The physical, optical, mechanical, and radiation absorption features of a Sodium-barium-vanadate glass system containing iron (III) oxide were obtained by direct calculations and Monte Carlo simulations in this study. The investigated glasses have a chemical definition given as (20 – x)Na2O + 25BaO + 55V2O5 + xFe2O3 (where x = 0, 5 10, 20 mol% represents SBV-Fe0–3). The mass density from 3.732 to 4.326 g cm−3 while molar volume decreased from 40.40 to 39.37 cm3 mol−1 as the Fe2O3 insertion ratio rose in the glasses. Replacing Na2O with Fe2O3 in the glasses led to a decrease in the refraction index, reflectance loss, and metalization criterion of the glasses, while on the other hand the optical transmittance increased. The Young's, longitudinal, bulk, and shear moduli all increased as the glass density improved. The gamma radiation shielding competence evaluated from FLUKA simulations and confirmed by XCOM calculations revealed that the incident photon energy and the chemical structure of the glasses influenced the photon absorbing capacity of the glasses. The linear attenuation coefficient decayed from 0.4852 to 0.1409 cm−1 for SBV-Fe0 while that of SBV-Fe1, SBV-Fe2, and SBV-Fe3 decayed from 0.5021 to 0.1479 cm−1, 0.5203 to 0.1544 cm−1, and 0.5573 to 0.1656 cm−1 accordingly as energy increases from 0.284 to 2.506 MeV. Similarly, the mass attenuation coefficient, effective atomic number and other estimated photon absorption quantities all point to an improved absorption capacity with the trend SBV-Fe0 < SBV-Fe1 < SBV-Fe2 < SBV-Fe3. Further, the ΣR of the glasses have values of 1.2162, 1.1977, 1.1919, and 1.213 cm−1 for the SBV-Fe0–3 respectively. Analysis of the thermal neutron cross section of the glasses reveals that the inclusion and subsequent increase of the Fe2O3 content of the SBV-Fe glasses has a positive impact on the thermal neutron interaction parameters. SBV-Fe glasses are valuable materials for radiation absorption functions when compared with common shields.