Elsevier

Progress in Nuclear Energy

Volume 52, Issue 7, September 2010, Pages 620-623
Progress in Nuclear Energy

Gamma-ray shielding properties of concrete including barite at different energies

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pnucene.2010.04.006Get rights and content

Abstract

Radiation shielding properties of barite and concrete produced with barite have been investigated. The results have been compared with the standard shielding material of lead. The linear attenuation coefficients have been calculated 1 keV–1 GeV and compared with the measurement performed using gamma spectrometer contains NaI(Tl) detector and MCA at 662, 1173 and 1332 keV.

Introduction

From the beginning of using radioactive sources in a variety of fields with the development of technology, radiation dosimetry becomes an important subject in physics. Because radiation is dangerous for cell and it should be protected. This can be done by three main methods namely time, distance and shielding. Heavy elements such as lead or tungsten are ideal materials to be used in radiation shielding. On the other hand such heavy elements cannot be used in building construction. Barite (BaSO4) is an alternative material can be used directly or as an aggregate in the concrete for this purposes. The radiation shielding properties of a material is presented in terms of the linear attenuation coefficient μ (cm−1) and it is defined as the probability of a radiation interacting with a material per unit path length (Woods, 1982). As this subject is very important for health, many different studies on the linear attenuation coefficient of different materials in the literature have been performed. This includes biological materials (Chitralekha et al., 2005, Gowda et al., 2005, Icelli et al., 2004, Manohara and Hanagodimath, 2007, Midgley, 2005, Sandhu et al., 2002), elements (Murty et al., 2001, Murty and Devan, 2001, Murty and Devan, 2004), alloys (Angelone et al., 2001, El-Kateb et al., 2000, Icelli et al., 2005a, Icelli et al., 2005b, Murty et al., 2000), compound (Baltas et al., 2007, Bhandal and Singh, 1995, Icelli et al., 2003, Icelli et al., 2004, Icelli et al., 2005a, Icelli et al., 2005b, Icelli and Erzeneoglu, 2004, Khanna et al., 1996, Shivaramu and Ramprasath, 2000, Singh et al., 1996, Turgut et al., 2005) and some building materials (Akkurt et al., 2004, Akkurt et al., 2005a, Kharita et al., 2008, Bashter, 1997, El-Sayed, 2002, Singh et al., 2004).

In this paper, the linear attenuation coefficients of barite, concrete produced with barite have been measured and compared with the standard shielding material lead. The measured results have been compared with the calculation.

Section snippets

Experimental details

The concrete (BC) has been produced using Portland Cement (PC) 42.5 type of cement from Goltas plant in Isparta and barite was collected from Sarkikaragac-Isparta region at south of the Sultandagları region where the pureness of barite ore is 90% BaSO4. The water-to-cement ratio was kept constant of 0.5.

The linear attenuation coefficients of barite, barite concrete and lead have been measured using the gamma spectrometer which contains 3″ × 3″ NaI(Tl) detector (Akkurt, 2009). The signals from

Results and discussions

The linear attenuation coefficients for barite have been measured at photon energy of 662, 1173 and 1332 keV and the results were compared with the barite concrete and lead (Akkurt et al., in press). The measured and calculated results are compared in Fig. 4 where it can be seen that there is a good agreement between experimental and calculated results. It is also clear that the linear attenuation coefficients are the highest for lead as expected. It can also be seen that the linear attenuation

Acknowledgement

The authors wish to thank the TUBITAK (Turkiye Bilimsel ve Teknik Araştırma Kurumu) for partly supporting this work with the project number of 106M127.

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