EPR studies and radiation shielding properties of silver aluminum phosphate glasses

This article presents a study of the attenuation of gamma rays in glassy materials and an Electron Paramagnetic Resonance (EPR) study of xAl2O3·(40−x)Ag2O·60P2O5 system where x varies between 0–20 mol%. The EPR study examined the effect of aluminum oxide on the EPR parameters of silver ions in phosphate glasses. The EPR spectra show that after gamma irradiation, additional signals are connected to silver-related species such as Ag0, Ag+, or Ag2+. Gamma rays with energies ranging from 118.27 to 1418.15 keV were used to investigate the attenuation coefficients in current glass samples with thicknesses up to 3 cm. The attenuation of gamma rays was investigated by measuring the mass attenuation coefficient (MAC), half-value layer (HVL), effective atomic number (Zeff), and exposure build-up factor of various glass samples with different aluminum oxide concentrations. The results showed that the MAC values for glasses with a high concentration of aluminum oxide were larger than those for binary glasses at high energies, indicating an improvement in shielding capacity. Also, the glasses studied in this work provide shorter HVL than RS-253 G18 commercial glasses and various concrete samples, including ordinary, Basalt-magnetite, hematite-serpentine, and ilmenite-limonite. These findings provide important insights into using phosphate glasses as gamma-ray shields and the effect of aluminum oxide on the properties of phosphate glasses containing silver ions.