Abstract
Among diverse glass types such as silicates, borates, or tellurites, germanate glasses (GG) possess great potential in different application areas. To make use of its benefits in radiation shielding applications, the glass compositions of (45-x)Li2O - 55GeO2- xZnO (x: 0, 10, 15, 20, and 25 mol%) were investigated. The intended glass series, LG-Zn0 to LG-Zn4, was explored by performing physical and optical calculations, mechanical strength estimations, and finally theoretical and simulations radiation shielding characteristics. According to the physical property calculations, ZnO insertion contributes to an increase in ρglass from 3.2434 to 4.1426 g cm−3, whereas causes a decrease in Vm from 21.89 to 20.24 cm3 mol−1. On the other hand, optical feature calculations revealed that the Eg values are decreasing as the ZnO content increases in the glass network, which in turn contributes to increasing the parameter n. In the perspective of mechanical strength estimations, the mechanical moduli can be enhanced owing to the contribution of higher ZnO amounts in the lithium-germanate glass system. On the other hand, with changing ZnO content (from 0 to 25 mol%), we found that the LAC values grow up from 181.410 cm−1 to 234.362 cm−1 at 15 keV, while the increase rate became from 0.349 cm−1 to 0.397 cm−1 at the energy of Co (0.347 MeV) as a result of radiation shielding studies. Based upon LAC findings, mass attenuation coefficient (MAC), effective atomic number (Zeff), and mean free path (MFP) parameters were successfully evaluated. All in all, this work clearly demonstrated that ZnO is a good option for improving the properties in lithium-germanate glass system.