PHOTON AND NEUTRON SHIELDING COMPETENCE OF SnO₂ – REINFORCED WITH 22Na₂O – 15B₂O₃ – 45P₂O₅ – (18 - X) K₂O BIOACTIVE GLASSES.

Background: Tin(IV) oxide (SnO2) has favorable photon shielding properties due to its high atomic number (Z), which enables effective attenuation of gamma rays and X-rays. When incorporated into bioactive glasses, SnO2 dopants enhance the overall photon shielding performance of the composite material. The high Z of Sn (Z=50) assists in attenuating the photons through photoelectric effect, Compton scattering, and pair production mechanisms. Objective: The research is to assess photon and neutron shielding competence of SnO2- reinforced 22Na2O –15B2O3 –45P2O5 – (18 – x) K2O – xSnO2 (NBPK) (x = 0, 2, 4, 6, 8, and 10 Mol% ) bioactive glasses for better radiation shielding. Methods: In this study, the melt quenching process is assumed in making the glass system 22Na2O –15B2O3 – 45P2O5 – (18 – x) K2O – xSnO2, x = 0, 2, 4, 6, 8 and 10 mol %) using NH4H2PO4, H3BO4, Na2CO3, K2CO3 [12]. Computational approach was applied to estimate for each value of x. The nominal compositions of the prepared glasses were given as S1-S6 and was run in the WinXCOM software. The XCOM code is a database for calculating mass attenuation coefficients at different photon energies [11, 13].The obtained value from WinXCOM (S1-S6) were transported to excel for further calculations and thereby taken to the origin software for graph plotting. Results: The result of the simulation shows that as energy changes, the Mass attenuation coefficient (MAC) values of all the glass samples change in a similar way. As a result, the MAC values tend to be in the order of S1 < S2 < S3 < S4 < S5 < S6 for the majority of the energy spectrum. S1-S6's LAC maximums were 0.08, 0.45, 0.59, 0.71, 0.80, and 0.92, respectively. The greatest HVT was acquired for all glass tests with values 65.56, 13.28, 11.18, 10.26, 9.81, and 9.16 cm for S1-S6 accordingly. Conclusion: The calculated radiation interaction parameters revealed that S6 outperformed the other five bioactive glasses in this study as a photon, proton, and neutron absorber. In general, photon shielding applications may benefit more from the studied bioactive glasses than conventional concrete.