Examining the specification of gamma-ray shielding with increasing TiO2 concentration in the Bi2O3-ZnO-Pb3O4-Al2O3 glass sample with simulation and computational tools

In this study, using the MCNP Monte Carlo code, the gamma-ray protection properties of the glass system with the composition of (55-x)Bi2O3-15Pb3O4-20Al2O3-10ZnO-xTiO2 with certain concentrations (35, 30, 25, 20, 15, 10, 5 = mol percent) were examined by calculating the several parameters related to photon attenuation such as half-value layer (HVL), mean free path (MFP), mass attenuation coefficient (𝜇m), effective atomic number (Zeff) and buildup factor (BF) for different energies in the range of 1500-100 keV. To verify the simulation results, a comparison was made with the XCOM database. It was observed that the data extracted from the NIST-XCOM database and the MCNP simulation results are in reasonable agreement with each other. The percentage deviation (PD) between the data extracted from the NIST-XCOM database and the results obtained from the MCNP simulations was less than 0.59% in most cases. The results show that compared to conventional protective materials such as concrete and lead, the new composition shows more effective attenuation parameters in addition to physical properties. The glass with the highest concentration of TiO2 has the most favorable properties in terms of density compared to the investigated protective materials. In this study, one of the variance reduction methods was used in order to reduce the error in MCNP calculations. The agreement between the data extracted from the NIST-XCOM database and the results of the simulations of this study shows that Monte Carlo modeling is an effective method to investigate gamma-ray shielding characteristics.