Investigation of the optical, mechanical, and radiation shielding features for strontium-borotellurite glass system: Fabrication, characterization, and EPICS2017 computations

Abstract The optical, mechanical and radiation shielding features of novel (60-x) TeO2 -10SrO – (30+x) B2O3 glass systems have been investigated. The density of the glasses decreases from 5.107 to 3.593 g/cm3 whereas the molar volume increases from 24.86 to 30.32 cm3 as the concentration of the TeO2 decreases. The band gap energy increases from 3.388 to 3.417 eV and from 3.083 to 3.118 eV for direct and indirect bandgap, respectively with the decreasing concentration of the TeO2. Further, the Urbach energy descends from 0.03959 to 0.03306 with an ascending insertion of the TeO2. The increase in elastic moduli indicated the improvement in the elastic properties of the samples with increase in TeO2 concentration. The mass attenuation coefficient (μ/ρ) was calculated via EPICS2017, and the results revealed that the μ/ρ EPICS2017 is slightly lower than μ/ρ XCOM by an average of 0.001 cm2 g-1 for the five glasses, and this means that the two theoretical models of the five glass samples are in good agreement. The linear attenuation coefficient (µ) was calculated and we found that when the concentration of the high molecular weight component (TeO2) decreases from 60 to 40 mol%, a reduction in the µ is occurred, and the µ follows the trend: TBS30> TBS35> TBS40> TBS45> TBS50. We also determined the average half value layer ( HVL ) for each glass sample and we found that the HVL varied between 1.835 cm (for TBS30) and 2.614 cm (for TBS50). An inverse relation between the TeO2 content and the HVL is reported.