Structural, mechanical and radiation shielding properties of newly developed tungsten lithium borate glasses: An experimental study

Abstract

The melt quench technique was used to fabricate the (25-x)Li2O-75B2O3-xWO3 (x = 1, 3, 5 and 7.5 mol%). The mass attenuation coefficients (μm) of the studied glasses were obtained by using the Gamma (γ) rays spectrometer (CANBERRA photo multiplier tube base model 802) which includes a detector (3 × 3 in.) NaI(Tl) crystal and the multichannel analyzer. The measured values have been compared with XCOM program at selected photon energies. Geometric progression (G–P) fitting method has been used to calculate the exposure build-up factor (EBF) and energy absorption build-up factor (EABF) in the energy range of 0.015–15 MeV. Moreover, EBF and EABF values have been applied to compute the specific fraction of absorbed energy (Sfae) and relative dose distribution (Rdd). The pulse-echo technique has been used to measure the elastic moduli for glass samples. The TBL4 glass sample shows the highest μm, effective atomic number (Zeff) and Young moduli values and lowest half value layer (HVL), mean free path (MFP), EBF, EABF, Sfae and Rdd values. The results of this investigations revealed that the fabricated TBL4 glass sample could be potentially utilized as an efficient and desirable kind of glass material as gamma shield to reduce the deleterious effects of radiation.