Mass stopping power and nuclear shielding behavior of lead borate glasses: Influence of gamma irradiation on physical properties

Abstract

Four glassy systems with dissimilar PbO ratios were synthesized by the melting method. Raman scattering was used to study the chemical bonds inside the glass structures and follow the chemical changes occurring inside their networks after using the glasses in a radiation field. The glass samples are based on several tetrahedral and triangular groups where in BO3 is predominant. The energy gap of each sample was calculated from two different equations extracted from absorption and transmission measurements as ETauc and ETrans, respectively. Also, chemical durability has been studied to show the stability of these glasses against acidic environmental effect and followed by SEM images. Our findings showed that radiation effect on the prepared samples did not cause significant variations of structural and optical characteristics, however, increasing PbO concentrations resulting in enhancement of several radiation attenuation competencies. This study presented a comprehensive study of the radiation shielding properties of lead borate glass by assessing the effectiveness of proton, electron, neutron, and gamma shielding. Mass stopping power (ψp) and projected range (PR) values were calculated for proton particles (H1) using SRIM Monte Carlo simulation code and its subroutine TRIM, which predicts the radiation damage and atomic displacements per atom (dpa), while the ESTAR program was used to calculate ψe and the continuous slowing down approximation (CSDA) range for electrons. Furthermore; the findings estimate the excess lifetime cancer risk% for radiation workers behind the glass shields. Also, the glass with the lowest PbO content has the highest ΣR value, whereas the sample with the highest PbO content has the highest MAC value of gamma rays.