Investigation on the Properties of Calcium – Sulfate Ultra-Phosphate Glasses Doped Trivalent Samarium: A Potential Use for Radiation Shielding Applications

Abstract

The present study, five different glass samples were encoded as; CSPSm1, CSPSm2, CSPSm3, CSPSm4 and CSPSm5 based on 20CaSO₄ + (10 – x) P₂O₃ – Sm₂O₃, (0.3mol %) were fabricated. XRD spectra verified the amorphous phase of the prepared samples. Phy-X/PSD software was used to ascertain the ay shielding characteristics on ultra-phosphate glasses, this software can generate a data on shielding parameters of a selected energy region between 1.50E - 02 to 1.50E + 01 with radioactive sources for ²⁴¹Am, ⁶⁰Co, ¹⁰⁹Cd, ¹³⁷Cs, ¹⁵²Eu, ⁵⁵Fe, ¹³¹I, ²²Na, and ¹³³Ba with their energies and some K-shell characteristics at the X-ray energies of Ag, Ba, Cu, Rb, Tb and Mo elements. The penetrating ability of such radiations through specific material was discovered. Densities increases simultaneously from 3.145 to 3.987 g/cm³, the mass attenuation coefficient depends on sample density, the attenuation coefficient of samples gets enhanced with addition of samarium oxide. Shielding related parameters observed are the Mass attenuation coefficient (MAC), Linear attenuation coefficient (LAC), Half value layer (HVL), Tenth value layer (TVL), Mean free path (MFP), and effective atomic number (Z_eff). The attenuation coefficients at 15 keV is between 17.726 and 58.56 cm^-1 as highest and the lowest at 15 MeV between 0.046 and 0.127 cm^-1. The gamma photon energy was evaluated at the range of 0.015MeV to 15 MeV, and the attenuation factors result is highly depended on the concentration of the samarium ion, the material has lower mean free paths. These results proved that the glass samples have excellent gamma–ray shielding effectiveness.