Abstract
Thermal stability is one of the main preferred material properties for industrial applications. Gamma radiation has a high ability to deeply penetrate in structure of materials and develop their physical properties. This work is devoted to sensitize copper hydroxynitrate Cu-2(OH)(3)NO3, and study the effect of different doses of gamma rays on its thermal stability. The sample was prepared by co-precipitation technique and identified using X-ray diffraction and Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy. The prepared sample was divided to seven subsamples, six of them were irradiated by different doses from 10 KGy up to 300 KGy while the seventh one used as a reference sample. The obtained results showed significant enhancement of thermal stability which represented by shifts of onset temperature to higher values for the irradiated samples from 10 to 100 kGy. Also, temperature corresponding to the residual masses 5%, 15% and 25% increased with increasing gamma radiation dose. However, the thermal stability reduced for the sample irradiated with high dose (300 KGy). The obtained data could be explained in terms of the principle of free radicals formation beside the interaction of these free radicals with each other. The obtained results shed light on the positive effect of the selective dose of gamma radiation for enhancement of the thermal stability of chemical structures.