Effect of Gd2O3 on the radiation shielding characteristics of Sb2O3–PbO–B2O3–Gd2O3 glass system

Abstract In this work, with the help of Phy-X/PSD software, we studied the radiation shielding characteristics of 25Sb2O3–30PbO–(45−y) B2O3–yGd2O3 glasses (with y = 0, 0.2, 0.4, 0.6, 0.8 and 1.0 mol%). The mass attenuation coefficient (μ/ρ) shows a progressive reduction with increase of energy, which denotes that the shielding efficiency of the PbSbBGd0- PbSbBGd1 glasses reduces when the energy was increased. The μ/ρ at 284 keV takes the values between 0.25988 and 0.26022 cm2/g and reduces to 0.18658 cm2/g (for PbSbBGd0) and 0.18673 (for PbSbBGd1) cm2/g at 347 keV. In addition, reasonable elevation in the linear attenuation factor (μ) values was observed with the addition of Gd2O3. This implies that, an improvement in the gamma rays shielding characteristics has occurred with the addition of Gd2O3. PbSbBGd1 sample had the largest μ values compared to all other glasses and equal to 1.418, 1.018, 0.401, 0.297 and 0.220 cm-1 at 284, 347, 826, 1275 and 2506 keV respectively. The results show that the replacement of B2O3 by Gd2O3 increases the effective atomic number (Zeff) for the PbO–Sb2O3–B2O3–Gd2O3 glass system and the Zeff of PbSbBGd1 is higher than that of PbSbBGd0- PbSbBGd0.8 samples, whereas that of PbSbBGd0 is the lowest. The mean free path (MFP) shows strong energy dependence and becomes larger at higher energies. The MFP shows gradual decrease, as the content of Gd2O3 was increased at the expense of B2O3 which implies that radiation attenuation features for the PbSbBGd0- PbSbBGd1 specimen have improved with more amount of Gd2O3. The least half value layer (HVL) is found at 284 keV for all concentrations of Gd2O3 and equals to 0.537 cm (for PbSbBGd0) and 0.489 cm (for PbSbBGd1). While, the highest HVL is registered at 2506 keV and equals to 3.456 cm for PbSbBGd0 and 3.152 cm for PbSbBGd1.