Micro‐hardness and gamma‐ray attenuation properties of lead iron phosphate glasses

Abstract

For safe immobilization of nuclear waste, lead-iron phosphate glasses are promising as high-level commercial and defense materials. In this research article, the compositional, elastic, and gamma shielding properties of the glasses containing (80 − x)P2O5– xFe2O3–20PbO with x = 20, 25, 30, 35 mol% were reported. The compositional and elastic parameters including the micro-hardness of the investigated glass samples were obtained based on Makishima-Mackenzie’s theory (MM-theory) and R model. We found that the deviation between these two methods decreased as Fe2O3 concentrations increased from 20 to 35 mol %. Additionally, γ-ray attenuation properties of the P2O5– Fe2O3–PbO glass system were evaluated using Geant4 simulation toolkit. The simulation results were compared with the theoretical ones extracted from Py-MLBUF software. The obtained results reveal that the MACs of the glasses vary from 0.030 to 40.014 cm2/g for PFP-A, from 0.031 to 41.502 cm2/g for PFP-B, 0.031 to 43 cm2/g for PFP-C and from 0.031 to 44.400 cm2/g for PFP-D. Maximum Zeff values of present glasses are obtained at 0.10 MeV whereas minimum Zeff values are obtained at 1.5 MeV. Finally, the fundamental γ-ray attenuation properties of the P2O5– Fe2O3–PbO glass system are found to be comparable with those of traditional and commercial radiation shields such as RS-253-G18 and RS-360 commercial glasses, ordinary concrete, barite concrete and TBZP10 from scientific literature. The results indicated that MFPs of the investigated glasses are lower than those of RS-360 glass, but they are higher than those of barite concrete and TBZP10.