Probing the effect of PbO on the mechanical and gamma ray shielding properties of CuO-CaO-B2O3 glasses

The conventional melt quenching procedure has been adopted for the fabrication for the PbO B2O3 - CuO - CaO glass system. The effect of the addition of the PbO on the mechanical and gamma ray shielding properties of dark black CuO - CaO - B2O3 glasses has been investigated. The sample's density increases from 3.937 g/cm3 to 4.762 g/cm(3) when the PbO concentration goes from 35 to 50 mol percent. The mechanical characteristics based on the coordination numbers of the cations present in the sample indicates that the elastic moduli decrease with the addition of the PbO. The radiation shielding parameters for the novel glasses were reported using Phy-X/PSD for the radiation energies between 0.015 and 15 MeV. The linear attenuation coefficient (LAC) with different concentrations of PbO decreases with the increase in the energy up to 0.1 MeV with a sudden increase in the LAC happening at this energy. A very quick decrease in the LAC is noticed when the energy reaches 0.03 MeV. The glass with composition of 50PbO-20B2O3- 15CuO-15CaO shows the maximum values for LAC. We compared the mass attenuation coefficient (MAC) for our prepared A1-A4 glasses with other glass systems at 0.662 MeV. We found that the samples with a composition of 35PbO-35B2O3-15CuO-15CaO shows a comparable MAC with 45B(2)O(3)-20Bi(2)O(3)-15Sb(2)O(3)-20Na2O2. The effective atomic number (Z(eff)) at 0.1 MeV is very high due to the K-edge of Pb. The Zeff results demonstrated that when the PbO increases on the expense of B2O3, the Zeff is improved.