Sustainable ceramics for gamma-ray protection applications, employing inexpensive natural clay and recycled glass waste

The current study seeks to utilize the recycled waste glass powder and natural clay to produce new inexpensive ceramic material can be used in the γ-ray shielding applications. The ceramic composites were fabricated according to the chemical formula of (85-x) clay + 15wt% boric acid (H 3 BO 3 )+ x glass waste, where x = 0, 10, 15, 20, 35, and 50 wt%. The impact of partial substituting of glass waste for the natural clay on the structural and γ-ray shielding properties investigated experimentally. The minerals mainly constitute the synthesized ceramics were determined using the X-ray diffraction. Thereafter, the changes in the functional groups within the prepared ceramics as a result of raising the glass waste concentration was evaluated using the Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy. Additionally, the addition of the glass waste to the fabricated ceramics samples increases their porosity, pore volume, water absorption factor, while their density decreased, as determined by the experimental measurements. Furthermore, the experimental measurements for the shielding properties using the NaI (Tl) detector show that, the increase in recycled glass waste dopant concentration from 0 to 50 wt% decreases the linear attenuation coefficient from 0.552 cm -1 to 0.504 cm -1 . This small decrease in the LACs increases slightly the thickness equivalent lead from 0.5 cm to 0.52 cm, respectively. The study shows that the shielding performance of the fabricated ceramics is ≈10% at 0.662 MeV.