Abstract
The amorphous PbO-CuO-CaO-B2O3 glasses, fabricated using the melt quenching technique, were studied for their physical, structural and gamma ray shielding behaviour. The density of the glasses increases with PbO content. As ion concentration increases whereas the polaron radius and inter-nuclear distance decreases with lead content. Oxygen packing density and oxygen molar volume depends upon the density and molar volume values. The recorded FTIR spectra indicated the stretching and bending vibrations of the groups formed in the glasses. The transmission factor (TF) was calculated at 0.284 and 0.511 MeV and we found that for the glass with chemical composition 35PbO-35B2O3–15CuO–15CaO, the TF is 54% at a photon of 0.284 MeV, but this value increases to 77% when the photon has an energy of 0.511 MeV. Also, the radiation shielding results demonstrated that the radiation protection efficiency of glass is improved by adding PbO. From the tenth value layer TVL) results, we found that with increasing energy, the ratio TVLA1/TVLA4 decreases gradually, and this means that the effect of PbO is more pronounced at lower energies. At 0.284 MeV, the recorded ratio is 1.4, while this ratio decreases to 1.3 at an energy of 0.347 MeV and to 1.2 at an energy of 0.826 MeV. The results from this work reveal the importance of using a relatively high percentage of heavy metal oxides such as PbO in the manufacture of new and promising glass systems for use as alternative materials in radiation protection.