Impact of heavy metal waste on gamma ray shielding performance of epoxy resin: an experimental investigation

The project's goal is to create new, low-cost materials with low density that can withstand the transport of γ-photons with low and intermediate energy. As a result, a set of four epoxy resins reinforced with different amounts of heavy metallic debris were created. By enlarging the waste component of the manufactured composites by 0–40 wt%, the density of the composites increased from 1.134 ± 0.022 to 1.560 ± 0.0312 g/cm³. The experimental assessment of the linear attenuation coefficient shows an increase with factors of 6.6, 2, and 1.5 times, respectively, for—photon energies of 33, 121, and 662 keV. The augmentation composites density has an impact on these parameters. The half-value thickness and the transmission factor for the fabricated composites decreased with enriching the heavy metallic waste composition, where the half-value thickness decreased from 5.95 to 3.08 cm as well as the transmission factor decreased from 89.01 to 79.86% with enriching the heavy metallic waste concentration from 0 to 40 wt%. The study shows the invalidity to use the fabricated samples to attenuate the γ-photons with energies higher than 662 keV, where the linear attenuation coefficient enhanced by a factor of 19% from 0.078 to 0.094 cm⁻¹.