Structural, optical, and shielding investigations of TeO2–GeO2–ZnO–Li2O–Bi2O3 glass system for radiation protection applications

Glass gained much attention to be utilized in various applications, for this reason different kinds of glass compositions was the subject of investigation. In this work, we successfully fabricated a series of tellurite–germanate glasses with a composition of (70-x)TeO2–10GeO2–10ZnO–10Li2O–xBi2O3, where x = 0, 5, 10 and 15 (all in mol%). Ordinary melt-quenching was used to synthesize the mentioned glass series with 975 °C as a melting temperature for 30 min and 300 °C for annealing to release the internal stress. To study the structural properties of these glasses, X-ray diffraction (XRD) was used to confirm the glassy structure of these glasses. Regarding that, XRD profiles were recorded in ranges between 10° and 80° for all samples. Moreover, FTIR was employed to study the functional groups of all elements, which were used in the composition with the range of 4000–400 cm−1. Optical absorption was used to investigate the cutoff wavelength and optical band gap. Optical absorption was measured at the range of 200–800 nm. The variation of the attenuation properties for the tested tellurite–germanate glasses has been investigated using WinXcom software for photon energy ranges between 0.015 and 15 MeV. The examined attenuation properties include linear and mass attenuation coefficients, half value layer and mean free path, and effective atomic number of the radiation shielding glass. The present results suggest the utilization of the new prepared glass samples in radiation shielding applications.