Impact of heavy metal waste on gamma ray shielding performance of epoxy resin: an experimental investigation

The project's goal is to create new, low-cost materials with low density that can withstand the transport of gamma-photons with low and intermediate energy. As a result, a set of four epoxy resins reinforced with different amounts of heavy metallic debris were created. By enlarging the waste component of the manufactured composites by 0-40 wt%, the density of the composites increased from 1.134 +/- 0.022 to 1.560 +/- 0.0312 g/cm3. The experimental assessment of the linear attenuation coefficient shows an increase with factors of 6.6, 2, and 1.5 times, respectively, for-photon energies of 33, 121, and 662 keV. The augmentation composites density has an impact on these parameters. The half-value thickness and the transmission factor for the fabricated composites decreased with enriching the heavy metallic waste composition, where the half-value thickness decreased from 5.95 to 3.08 cm as well as the transmission factor decreased from 89.01 to 79.86% with enriching the heavy metallic waste concentration from 0 to 40 wt%. The study shows the invalidity to use the fabricated samples to attenuate the gamma-photons with energies higher than 662 keV, where the linear attenuation coefficient enhanced by a factor of 19% from 0.078 to 0.094 cm-1.