Extensive study of newly developed highly dense transparent PbO-WO3-BaO-Na2O-B2O3 glasses for radiation shielding applications

Amorphous PbO – WO3 – BaO – Na2O – B2O3 glass system have fabricated using traditional melt quenching method. The XRD and FTIR spectra confirm the amorphous nature and the various structural properties of the glasses respectively. The various optical properties have been measured in the spectral range 400–4000 cm−1. Also, to understand the shielding ability of the fabricated glasses, we used the Geant4 model of a HPGe detector and WinXcom program to calculate the mass attenuation coefficient (MAC) at six energies between 356 and 2510 keV. In order to confirm the agreement between both methods, we used correlation theory and calculated the correlation coefficients (R2) for each sample. It is found that the R2 values are close to 1 for all samples. The MAC values at 356 keV for the prepared samples lies between 0.221 and 0.246 cm2/g. It is found that the usage of different concentration of PbO (from 50 to 70 mol%) affects the MAC values and thus the attenuation ability of the samples due to the heavier density of the PbO in comparison to B2O3. The effective atomic number results showed that Pb70B10 sample (contains 70 mol% of PbO) was higher than the other samples. Hence, Pb70B10 absorbs more photons than the rest of the prepared glasses.