Enhancing radiation shielding effectiveness: a comparative study of barium-doped tellurite glasses for gamma and neutron radiation protection

This study investigated the radiation shielding performance of the xBaO-(30-x)TeO2-35Bi2O3-35B2O3 glass system, where x = 5, 10, 15, 20 and 25, using Phy-X/PSD software and MCNPX Monte Carlo code. Key radiation shielding indicators, including attenuation coefficients, half value layer (HVL), tenth value layer (TVL), effective atomic number (Zeff), mean free path (MFP), and build-up factors, were measured within the energy range of 0.015–15 MeV. Further, the study assessed the glasses' capacity to block fast neutrons, using the fast neutron removal cross-section (ΣR) as a metric. The results showed that gamma shielding effectiveness follows the order: BaTBiB-1 < BaTBiB-2 < BaTBiB-3 < BaTBiB-4 < BaTBiB-5 at all photon energies. Additionally, the ΣR values for BaTBiB-1 to BaTBiB-5 glasses were 0.10179, 0.10263, 0.10362, 0.10581, and 0.10623 cm−1, respectively. Therefore, the findings demonstrate that including BaO enhances the gamma and neutron shielding characteristics of tellurite glasses, making them valuable for radiation-related applications.