Photon-shielding performance of bismuth oxychloride-filled polyester concretes

The preparation of materials with high attenuation performance is one of the major issues in the radiation shielding applications. This study is based on the investigation of gamma-shielding characteristics of Bismuth (III) Oxychloride (BiClO) doped polymer concretes. In the produced polymer composites, unsaturated polyester, BiClO, methyl ethyl ketone peroxide (MEKP) and cobalt octoate 6% (CO-6) are chosen as resin, filling material, initiators and accelerators, respectively. The radioactive point-isotropic sources Na-22, Mn-54, Co-57, Co-60, Ba-133, (CS)-C-137, (EU)-E-152 and Am-241 with energies varying from 59.5 keV to 1408.0 keV were used and gamma spectrometer based HPGe detector were employed for the investigation. The obtained experimental data were compared with those of FLUKA code results as well as with XCOM results. We found that the attenuation coefficient values of the studied concretes were in good agreement with the results of other approaches at the investigated energies. BiClO (20%), which is the end-point of compositions studied, has the best radiation shielding property among the prepared polyester concretes. The radiation protection performance of unsaturated polyester resin thus improves with the insertion of BiClO as filler.