PbF₂ as a key modulator of gamma radiation shielding in PbO–PbF₂–B₂O₃–SiO₂ glass systems

Abstract

The radiation shielding properties of lead fluoroborate glasses containing 30 mol% SiO₂ have been examined using Phy-X software. The mass attenuation coefficient (MAC) results demonstrated that the tetsed glasses are good attenuator against the low energy radiation, and their attenuation performance diminishes as the energy of the radiation increases. The MAC increases with the addition of PbF₂, and the difference in MAC between the glasses with different PbF₂ contents is significantly high at lower energy region. At high energy, the difference in MAC between the glasses is small which suggested that as the energy of the photons increases, the MAC for these glasses tend to converge. The linear attenuation coefficient (LAC) for the glasses is investigated and we found that the LAC for the glass with 49 mol% of PbF₂ is 58% bigger than that of the glass with 21 mol%. We investigated the average half value layer ($\overline{HVL }$) for the tested glasses when exposed to ¹³⁷Cs and ⁶⁰Co and the results showed that the values of $\overline{HVL }$ for ⁶⁰Co are about double those for ¹³⁷Cs for all glasses, which suggests that the energies emitted by ⁶⁰Co in general penetrate the glass sample more deeply in comparison with the photons emitted by ¹³⁷Cs. The mean free path (MFP) of the glasses against the density shows the desirable properties of PbF₂, as the MFP values decrease when the density increases.