Study the shielding capacity of some advanced epoxy ceramic composites against ionizing radiations

Abstract New epoxy based ceramic materials filled with various nano-sized (average size of 30 nm) heavy metal oxides (HMO) such as ZnO, CuO, WO 3 , and CeO 2 have been investigated. The shielding performance of the epoxy composites was tested experimentally utilizing source-collimator-detector technique. The gamma sources emit different lines 0.059 MeV from 241 Am, 0.662 MeV from 137 Cs and (1.173, 1.333 MeV) from 60 Co. The density was measured experimentally and achieved the highest value of 1.395 g/cm 3 for both E-WO 3 and E-CeO 2 , while the lowest value was for E-ZnO at 1.376 g/cm 3 . The linear attenuation coefficient (LAC) was calculated by Phy-X software and compared with the experimental data. The LAC was 0.748, 0.702, 1.315 and 3.044 cm −1 for E-ZnO, E-CuO, E-WO 3 and E-CeO 2 , respectively at 0.059 MeV, while at 1.333 MeV, the LAC was 0.079, 0.079, 0.081 and 0.080 cm −1 , respectively. The fast neutron removal cross-section (FNRC) was 0.0997, 0.1005, 0.0991 and 0.0993 cm −1 , respectively, which gives better performance in probability of absorbing fast neutrons than ordinary concrete.