Synthesis and study of structural, optical and radiation-protective peculiarities of MTiO3 (M = Ba, Sr) metatitanate ceramics mixed with SnO2 oxide

Abstract In this work, series of novel metatitanate ceramics mixed with SnO2 (BTO, STO, BTO@SnO2, STO@SnO2) have been successfully prepared via the solid-state reaction route. The XRD patterns indicate that the BTO, BTO@SnO2 crystallized into the tetragonal structure, where a cubic structure was obtained for STO and STO@SnO2 ceramics. The refinement of the data revealed a variation in lattice parameters of the ceramics. The optical properties were analyzed by using an ultra–visible spectrophotometer. The results showed that values of optical band gap Eg are in the range of 3.0–3.3 eV for all ceramics. Moreover, the radiation shielding factors were reported and the results demonstrated that there is a decreasing tendency in the linear attenuation coefficient (LAC) as the energy changes from 0.2234 to 2.506 MeV. From the LAC results, the BaTiO3 ceramic is the most influential at blocking radiation. The half-value layer (HVL) was examined and we found a notable difference between the HVL of the four prepared ceramics. BTO has the least HVL and takes the range 0.725–4.53 cm between 0.2234 and 2.506 MeV. HVL minimum value is obtained at 0.2234 MeV for all compositions and equals 0.725, 0.895, 1.559, and 1.265 cm for BaTiO3, BTO@SnO2, STO, and STO@SnO2 respectively. The change in the transmission factor (TF) of the fabricated ceramics against the energy and the thickness is discussed, and we found that the four ceramics have the minimum TF at 0.2234 MeV and the greatest at 2.506 MeV. The TF for BTO is 56.31% at 0.2234 MeV, 73.76% at 0.356 MeV, 80.25% at 0.511 MeV and 91.3% at 2.506 MeV. The TF results suggest that the fabricated ceramics are good attenuators at low energies. The radiation shielding results confirmed that the prepared ceramics can be exploited as good candidates for radiation shielding applications.