Exploration of the B2O3-Bi2O3-MoO3 glass system based on its physical, optical, and gamma ray shielding capabilities

The physical, optical, and gamma ray shielding capabilities of the B2O3-Bi2O3-MoO3 glass system have been evaluated. The optical basicity of the current samples rises from 0.781 to 0.897 with increasing Bi2O3 concentration. The values of refractive index, dielectric constant and optical dielectric constant show uptrend and lies in the range of 2.248–2.346, 5.055–5.505, and 4.055–4.505 respectively with addition of Bi2O3 in the network. The Metallization criteria is found to decrease from 0.425 to 0.399 as the Bi2O3 concentration increases indicates that the samples are non-metallic in nature. The mass attenuation coefficient (MAC) of the selected glass system was calculated at 0.511 MeV photon energy using Phy-X software. We compared the MAC for the current glasses with B2O3 based glasses containing different amounts of Li2O and PbO. We found that the 50B2O3-30Bi2O3-20MoO3 glass has higher MAC than 35PbO-25Li2O-40B2O3, while 45B2O3-35Bi2O3-20MoO3 has close MAC to that of 45PbO-15Li2O-40B2O3. We also compared the current glasses with TeO2 based glasses containing different amounts of WO3 and MoO3. We found that the present glass system has much higher MAC than the WO3-MoO3-TeO2 glass system. Besides, the MAC for the present glasses was compared with TeO2 based glasses containing various amounts of ZnO and MoO3. The comparison demonstrated that all the glasses in the present work have much higher MAC than the ZnO-MoO3-TeO2 glasses. © 2021 Elsevier GmbH