Understanding the role of Bi 2 O 3 in the P 2 O 5 –CaO–Na 2 O–K 2 O glass system in terms of physical, structural and radiation shielding properties

The present work investigated the 40P2O5−20CaO−(30-x)Na2O−10K2O–xBi2O3 where x: 0, 2.5, 5, 7.5, and 10 mol% for potential use in radiation shielding applications. For this purpose, the BiCKNP series (1–5) were synthesized by using melt quenching technique. The structural properties were determined by applying X-ray diffraction (XRD) and Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) while glass density was figured out with the use of Archimede’s principle. Furthermore, the radiation shielding characteristics of the proposed glass systems were computed via the user-friendly Phy-X/PSD and MATLAB® softwares. According to the determinations, we found out that the glass density was increased from 2.3337 to 3.5182 g cm− 3 with the insertion of Bi2O3 from 0 to 10 mol%. From the XRD measurements, it was seen that all the selected samples are glassy materials with evident amorphous structures. In this FTIR spectra, the bands at ~ 520 cm− 1, ~ 710 cm− 1, ~ 880 cm− 1, ~ 1080 cm− 1, ~ 12,100 cm− 1, and ~ 1366 cm− 1 were determined, and the related oxide bands were highlighted. Moreover, the radiation shielding computations revealed that BiCKNP5 has the most linear attenuation coefficient (LAC) out of the BiCKNP glasses. Based upon the LAC determinations, the other essential parameters such as mass attenuation coefficient (MAC), mean free path (MFP), half-value layer (HVL), tenth-value layer (TVL), effective atomic number (Zeff), and effective electron density (Neff) were throughly calculated by using MATLAB® software. Additionally, mass stopping power (MSP) and projection range (PR) values were calculated by using SRIM Monte Carlo codes. It was observed that BiCKNP1 glass is greatly effective for protection against H1 and He+ 2, and BiCKNP5 has the largest range of 782.04 × 10− 1 mm, while BiCKNP1 has the lowest range of 689.28 × 10− 1 mm for PR protons (H1) calculated at 10 MeV energy. Lastly, we determined that BiCKNP5 and BiCKNP1 have the lowest and highest values ∑R (0.07886 and 0.09408 cm− 1) respectively.