Evaluation of radiation absorption capacity of some soil samples

Abstract

Abstract The aim of the present work is to investigate the radiation absorption capacity of different soil samples in Turkey. For this purpose, we used a γ ray transmission geometry to measure the mass attenuation coefficients of eight soil samples collected between Bingöl city and Solhan district, Turkey at different γ-ray energies in the range of 13.94–88.04 keV. The radioactive sources utilized in the experiment were 241Am, 109Cd and 133Ba. FFAST and WinXCOM programs were used to evaluate the theoretical mass attenuation coefficients values of the selected soil samples. There is a good agreement between experimental and theoretical results. Additionally, the mass attenuation coefficients values used to evaluate different radiation shielding parameters such as effective atomic number, half value layer and mean free path. The variation of shielding parameters was examined for soil composition and photon energy. The obtained results revealed that S6 soil sample is the best soil in terms of shielding effectiveness among all the collected soils due to lower values for half value layer and mean free path. The effective removal cross-section (Σ R ) of fast neutrons for the collected soils was also computed to examine neutrons shielding properties of the soil samples. It is found that the Σ R values for the soil samples are almost constant and lie within the range (0.04286–0.04949 cm−1).