Radiation attenuation properties of Bi2O3–Na2O– V2O5– TiO2–TeO2 glass system using Phy-X / PSD software

The purpose of this work is to investigate the effect of increasing Bi2O3 mol% on the radiation shielding parameters of tellurite glass system with the formula Bi2O3–Na2O– V2O5– TiO2–TeO2 by using Phy-X/PSD computer software between 15 keV and 10 MeV. The results showed that the attenuation factor is very large at 15 keV. The mass attenuation coefficient (μ/ρ) at 15 keV lies within the range of 55.96–67.03 cm2/g for the selected samples. The μ/ρ for the investigated samples at 10 MeV is in the range of 0.0365–0.0392 cm2/g. The results also revealed that the addition of Bi2O3 enhances the effective atomic number (Zeff) and the sample corresponding to the lowest and highest amount of Bi2O3 (coded as TeBTi1 and TeBTi6) has the lowest and highest Zeff. Moreover, Zeff has high values between 15 keV and 0.1 MeV and the maximum Zeff occurs at 0.1 MeV (equal to 61.01, 62.67, 64.10, 65.34, 66.44 and 67.41 for TeBTi1– TeBTi6 samples respectively). The half value layer (HVL) increased when the energy changes from 15 keV to 10 MeV and the lowest HVL occurs at 15 keV for the sample coded as TeBTi6 and equal to 0.0025 cm, while the HVL at this energy for TeBTi1 is 0.0056 cm. Also, we calculated the tenth value layer (TVL) for the present system and we found that TVL reduces with the increment of Bi2O3 content, and the sample corresponding to 22 and 0 mol% of Bi2O3 and TiO2 respectively namely TeBTi6 possesses the lowest value of TVL, thus has the best radiation attenuation performance in comparison to other selected glasses. Also, we evaluated the effective removal cross-sections of fast neutrons (∑R) for the investigated glass system and we found that the ∑R values increase with increase the concentration of Bi2O3.