Photon and thermal neutron shielding behaviors of aluminum calcium fluoroborate glass modified with barium oxide: FLUKA Monte Carlo, XCOM and experimental investigations

The borate glass system was prepared using the melt-quenching method. The XRD was used to confirm the amorphous structure of present samples, the FTIR was utilized to observe vibration modes, and the UV–Vis-NIR spectrophotometer was employed to measure transmittance spectra. The radiation shielding properties were examined by FLUKA Monte Carlo simulation, XCOM programs, and experimental methods. The density increased, while the molar volume decreased as the BaO content increased. For the X-ray and gamma-ray radiation, indicate that the addition of BaO instead of B₂O₃ improve the shielding properties, while the Σ is decreased for thermal neutron radiation. According to the results, adding BaO enhanced the X-ray and gamma-ray shielding properties. However, adding BaO led to the reduces its ability of shielding the thermal neutrons of the glass samples. These data are expected to be accommodate to considering for any applications which requires high efficiency of photon or thermal neutrons shielding.