The impact of TeO2 on physical, structural, optical and radiation shielding features for borate glass samples

Abstract

This research aims to discover the impact of the tellurium oxide on structural, physical, optical and radiation shielding properties of borate glass samples modified with BaO and MoO3. The amorphous nature of each glass sample was proven by X-ray diffraction (XRD) analysis. Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) was utilized to recognize the functional groups for TeO2 and B2O3. The results exhibit that the rise of TeO2 ratio raises the density of glasses and decreases their bandgap. On the other hand, the sample BTM3 shows the highest durability results. Moreover, the radiation shielding features were studied for the fabricated glasses by determining the mass attenuation coefficient (MAC) and other related factors. The effect of both B2O3 and TeO2 on the attenuation performance of the fabricated specimens was discussed. The MAC results show that when we replace the B2O3 with TeO2, the MAC increases, which means that the TeO2 leads to enhancement in the shielding competence of these glasses. At 15 keV, the MAC is 22.39 cm2 g−1 for the free TeO2 sample, while it is increased to 42.15 cm2 g−1 for the glass with 70 mol% of TeO2. In addition, when the density changes from 3.4446 to 5.5057 g cm−3, the LAC enhances and changes from 77.14 to 232.05 cm−1 at 15 keV, from 16.81 to 51.81 cm−1 at 50 keV, from 0.309 to 0.511 cm−1 at 0.5 MeV and from 0.096 to 0.211 cm−1 at 15 MeV. The results in this work showed that the current glass samples exhibit good stability that nominates the fabricated samples for different applications.