Optical, mechanical properties of TeO2-CdO-PbO-B2O3 glass systems and radiation shielding investigation using EPICS2017 library

The melt quenching method has been utilized to prepare the TeO2-CdO-PbO-B2O3 glass system. The optical packing density and the various elastic moduli increase as the as PbO increases from 30 to 40 mol%. The number of bonds per unit volume increases from 8.96 × 1022 cm−3 to 11.91 × 1022 cm−3 as the concentration of PbO increases. The indirect and direct band gap energies decrease from 2.828 to 2.705 eV and 3.112–2.931 eV respectively with increasing mol% of the PbO. The mass attenuation coefficient has been derived using EPICS2017 library. Below 0.284 MeV, the mass attenuation coefficient obtained by EPICS2017 are higher than that determined by Phy-X/PSD by approximately 2.5% for the five glass samples. In contrast, the mass attenuation coefficient determined by Phy-X/PSD are higher than that calculated from EPICS2017 at energies higher than 0.284 MeV, ranging from 0.09% to 0.36%. Moreover, we determined the linear attenuation coefficient and the results showed that the PbB5 glass (with 50 mol% of PbO) has a higher value of this parameter. The effective atomic number values at 122 keV span from 61.06 to 69.98, while at 1458 MeV span from 17.26 to 25.23. The mean free path results proved that the photons with low energy have small penetration ability thus the glasses have a good attenuation performance when exposed to radiation with low energy. For the glass with 30 mol% of PbO (coded as PbB1), the value of mean free path increased from 0.120 cm at 122 keV to 4.305 cm at 1458 keV.