Investigation of structural, physical and radiation attenuation properties of lithium tetra-borate with Cr₂O₃ glass-ceramics: experimental and theoretical methods

Different amounts of Cr₂O₃ were added to the mixture of 70Li₂B₄O₇ + xCr₂O₃ +(25-x)Li₂O + 4NiO + 0.75MnO₂ + 0.25Na₂O (x = 4, 8, 12, 16, and 20 wt%) to create new glass-ceramics samples with varying densities. Structural and physical, and γ-ray attenuation properties of the prepared samples have been investigated. To this end, the EpiXS software and EDXRF spectrometer, which is equipped with an Ultra Ge detector and a 133Ba (3 Ci) radioisotope source were employed. The relative differences between the theoretical and experimental results were in the range of 0.009 and 0.048. With XRD spectrometry, a material may be identified or its atomic-level structure could be discovered. In XRD investigations, the Cr1 structure which has the maximum quantity of Li₂O and the lowest amount of Cr₂O₃ exhibits large crystal particle sizes. The crystal particle size of the Cr2 structure is nonetheless greater than that of the Cr1 structure. The shift in the ratio of Li₂O to Cr₂O₃ caused a change in the size of the crystal particles inside the structure. The highest mass-attenuation coefficient (MAC) was found in the highly dense Cr5 sample compared to the other samples. A similar trend appears in the linear-attenuation coefficient (LAC). The half-value layer (HVL) arranged as follows at all energies: (HVL)_Cr1 > (HVL)_Cr2 > (HVL)_Cr3 > (HVL)_Cr4 > (HVL)_Cr5. The mean free path (MFP) showed a similar pattern of HVL. Results revealed that suggested materials can be protecting against radiation.