The radiation shielding parameters of a standard silica glass system

Abstract

Abstract We investigated the radiation shielding parameters for K2O-SiO2 glasses using Phy-X software. The results show that the glasses with a higher K2O concentration and lower SiO2 contents have higher mass attenuation coefficient (MAC) values at all energies. At 0.03 MeV, the MAC values of the tested glasses are varied between 0.873 and 1.907 cm2/g, while at 0.10 MeV they are in the range of 0.168–0.195 cm2/g. The linear attenuation coeffieicnet (LAC) shows a direct relation with the density, where the LAC for the glass with a density of 2.211 g/cm3 is 0.704 cm− 1 at 0.05 MeV and increases to1.351 cm− 1 for the glass with a density of 2.491 g/cm3. We reported the effective atomic number (Zeff) for the tested glasses and we found the glass with a composition of 40K2O-60SiO2 has the greatest Zeff at all energies. The Zeff values at 0.03 MeV are in order of 11.94–16.43, while at 4 MeV they are varied between 10.06 and 12.31. according to the half value layer results, 40K2O-60SiO2 glass has the lowest HVL, which means this glass has the best radiation shielding properties among the tested glasses.