Performance of newly developed concretes incorporating WO₃ and barite as radiation shielding material

Abstract

The preparation of suitable materials with satisfactory nuclear and mechanical properties to shield the ionizing radiation is a major concern in design the radiation protection. In this work, a group of heavy concrete samples were prepared containing varying concentrations of Tungsten oxide, and the mechanical and radiation shielding properties of the resulting samples was studied using theoretical and experimental techniques. Good agreement between the experimental test and the theoretical data was confirmed at all examined energies. Using WO₃ in the present concretes increases the density of specimens as well as the photons shielding capability. The increase in the amount of WO₃ caused a reduction in the half value layer and an increase in the radiation protection efficiency for the prepared concretes. The linear attenuation coefficient (LAC) for the control concrete reduces from 0.665 to 0.127 cm-1 over the selected energy range, while it is reduced from 1.803 to 0.134 cm-1 and from 2.014 to 0.138 cm-1 for Conc-1 and Conc-2 samples. The mean free path results demonstrated that all the specimens with additive materials (i.e. WO₃ and barite) have lower MFP than the control concrete. Thus, incorporating WO₃ and barite into the concrete significantly decreases the MFP of the specimens. The high-density concrete (i.e. Conc-5) absorbs gamma photons more efficaciously than the lower density samples. The radiation protection efficiency (RPE) for Concr-5 is 99% at 0.122 MeV, which suggests that this concrete can stop almost all the incoming photons with low energy.