Investigations of gamma ray and fast neutron shielding properties of tellurite glasses with different oxide compositions

In the present paper, the basic radiation parameters of tellurite glasses with different forming oxides (B2O3, BaO, K2O, V2O5, WO3, and ZnO) have been studied over a wide photon energy range from 1 keV to 100 GeV, using WinXCom program. These parameters are the mass attenuation coefficient (mu/rho), effective atomic number (Z(eff)), and electron density (N-e,N-eff). In addition, the macroscopic effective removal cross sections (Sigma(R)) for fast neutrons have been calculated. The dependence of different parameters on incident photon energy and chemical content has been discussed. Among the selected glass systems TeO2-WO3 and TeO2-B2O3 showed superior shielding properties for gamma-ray and neutrons, respectively. It is shown that the selected glass systems have higher values of the mass attenuation coefficients (mu/rho) than concretes and 0.SiO2:0.3BaO glass. These results indicate that tellurite glasses can be used as radiation shielding materials.