Impact of high concentration of the Bi2O3 on the physical, mechanical and gamma ray shielding capability of the Bi2O3–TeO2–CdO glass system

The primary objective to develop the high-density glasses have been fulfilled by replacing the TeO₂ with Bi₂O₃ in the Bi₂O₃–TeO₂–CdO glass system in the present work. Samples’ density (ρ) is large enough, ranging from 5.636 g/cm³ to 5.788 g/cm³. Due to the expansion of the network the molar volume (V_m) and oxygen molar volume increases and the oxygen packing density decreases. The elastic characteristics of the resulting glasses diminished with increasing Bi₂O₃ concentrations in the network structure. The radiation shielding parameters were presented between 0.122 and 1.458 MeV. The transmission factor (TF) for the glasses with thickness of 0.25 cm is around 50% at 0.245 MeV, while for the same glasses with thickness of 0.5 cm, we found that the TF is varied between 20 and 25%. The TF reaches a minimum of about 4–6% when the thickness is 1 cm. The TF data demonstrated that introducing more Bi₂O₃ into the samples leads to an improvement in the radiation shielding performance of the glasses. The effective atomic number (Z_eff) values at 0.245 MeV are equal to 61.74, 63.03, 64.16, and 65.18 for A1–A4, respectively. The average HVL (\(\overline{HVL }\)) results showed that a thin sample less than 0.4 cm thick can be used to shield photons with energies between 0.245 and 0.344 MeV, while a shield with thickness 0.65 to 0.70 cm is needed to attenuate photons with energies between 0.411 and 0.444 MeV.