Dense and environment friendly bismuth barium telluroborate glasses for nuclear protection applications

In this paper, four samples of bismuth barium telluroborate glasses in the chemical composition of 20Bi2O3 + 30BaO + xEr2O3 + (30 – x)B2O3 + 20TeO2, here x is between 0.05 and 2 mol%) coded as BTBE1, BTBE2, BTBE3, and BTBE4 are reported for potential use in nuclear shielding applications. Geant4 simulations were well designed to obtain the mass attenuation coefficient, μ/ρ for the BTBE1 – BTBE4 specimens at 356 keV–2.51 MeV photon energies. Then, the obtained results are confirmed by using WinXCOM platform. The μ/ρ values were used to assess the nuclear shielding capacity of BTBE1 – BTBE4 specimens in terms of effective atomic number, Zeff, mean free path, MFP, and half-value layer, HVL. Additionally, the buildup factors of BTBE1 – BTBE4 specimens were computed via G-P fitting method at 0.015–15 MeV photon energies and up to 40 mfp (penetration depths). Also, the neutron shielding capacity of the glasses was assessed by calculating the removal cross sections (∑R). Our results indicate that there is a remarkable enhancement in the gamma shielding features by adding Er2O3 content in the BTBE1 – BTBE4 specimens. It is found that BTBE4 and BTBE3 glass specimens have high shielding quality against nuclear radiation. Gamma-rays and fast neutrons shielding parameters of the BTBE1 – BTBE4 specimens are compared with several commercial and traditional shielding materials. These comparisons concluded that the reported glasses are quite useful for radiation protection purposes.