A comprehensive study on structural properties, photon and particle attenuation competence of CoNiFeCr-Ti/Al high entropy alloys (HEAs)

It is well known that high entropy alloys (HEAs) have a wide range of potential applications as radiation shielding due to their superior properties. The CoNiFeCr-Ti/Al compositions were chosen for their low cost as HEA in this study. The HEAs were successfully produced using the mechanical alloying (MA) method with equimolar CoNiFeCr, CoNiFeCrAl, and CoNiFeCrTi compositions. The production and structural properties of the alloys were investigated in detail. Besides, the photon and particle radiation shielding properties of the HEAs were calculated with the help of Phy-X/PSD, SRIM (10 keV-20 MeV), and ESTAR (10 keV-20 MeV) programs. The photon-matter interaction parameters were calculated in both specific photon energies emitted from 241Am, 133Ba, 109Cd, 60Co, 137Cs, 131I, and 22Na nuclides and a continuous energy range of 15 keV-15 MeV. The characterization of the alloys was investigated by using X-ray diffraction (XRD) and scanning electron microscopes (SEM) attached to an energy dispersive spectroscopy (EDX). It was found that the HEAs have a highly amorphous structure due to the selected production method. The crystal size of the alloys was calculated as 70, 35, and 20 nm for CoNiFeCr, CoNiFeCrAl, and CoNiFeCrTi, respectively. In terms of shielding properties, it has been determined that the produced HEAs have better shielding characteristics for photon and particle radiations than standard shielding concretes. In addition, the results demonstrated that CoNiFeCr alloy, which has the best shielding ability among the HEA alloys, can be used as a shielding material application requiring photon, electron, proton, alpha, and neutron radiations.