The Investigation of New Phosphate–Titanite Glasses According to Optical, Physical, and Shielding Properties

Abstract

The melt-quenching approach was used to prepare phosphate–titanite glasses with the composition P2O5-Na2O-CaO-8KF-CaCl2-xTiO2 (where x = 2, 4, and 6) in a mol %. The optical, physical, and shielding properties, such as the mass attenuation coefficient (MAC), half-value layer (HVL), effective electron density (Neff), and effective atomic number (Zeff), of the glasses were investigated at energies ranging between 15 and 200 keV. The shielding parameters were investigated using recently developed software (MIKE). The optical properties were examined using devices such as UV-Vis-NIR spectroscopy over wavelengths ranging between 190 and 2500 nm. The reported results showed that increasing the concentration of TiO2 led to an increase in the density from 2.657 to 2.682 g/cm3 and an increase in the OPD from 66.055 to 67.262 mol/L, while the molar volume (VM) and oxygen molar volume (VO) decreased from 39.21 to 39.101 cm3/mol and from 15.139 to 14.867 cm3/mol, respectively. The energy gap was found to decrease from 3.403 to 3.279 eV when the TiO2 concentration increased. Furthermore, as the surface plasmon resonance of TiO2 increases, so does its third-order susceptibility, non-linear refractive indices, linear attenuation, and mass attenuation. The shielding performance evaluation indicates that the most suitable energy range is between 15 and 50 keV. Based on the results, the PCKNT3 glass sample exhibits the highest attenuation performance of all of the samples tested.

Keywords

• phosphate–titanite glasses
• absorbance spectra
• optical energy gap
• third-order susceptibility
• non-linear refractive indices
• mass attenuation coefficient