Structural, optical and radiation shielding peculiarities of strontium titanate ceramics mixed with tungsten nanowires: An experimental study

Abstract

The development of environmentally friendly radiation shielding (RS) materials has become the requirement of the day. The aim is to either enhance the characteristics of existing materials or to search for novel materials with better RS properties that are stable, nontoxic, and abundant. Recently, SrTiO3 (STO), a perovskite material, has gained attention owing to its tunable and exceptional optical, electrical, and structural properties. In this work, we investigate the RS peculiarities of STO doped with various amounts of WO3 nanowires (x = 0.0, 2.0, 5.0, and 10.0 wt%). The different samples were firstly fabricated by the solid-state reaction method and then characterized by UV–visible spectroscopy and X-ray diffraction techniques. The four synthesized ceramics have cubic crystal structure. Both direct and indirect energy bandgaps showed an opposite variance with the crystallite size of the samples. The radiation shielding properties were experimentally assessed using the source-to-sample-to-detector technique. The linear attenuation coefficient (LAC) for STO is lower than that of the STO prepared with WO3 NWs, which demonstrated the importance of adding WO3 NWs to improve the attenuation performance of the synthesized ceramics. The radiation protection efficiency (RPE) at 0.06 MeV for the STO without and with WO3 NWs is almost 100%, which indicates that the current samples are efficient for low energy and can stop all the photons in this energy range. For the energy of 0.662 MeV, we found that the RPE became much less than 100% and reached 31.19% for the STO and varied between 31.95 and 38.58% for the STO with 2–10% of WO3 NWs.