Micro Pb filled polymer composites: Theoretical, experimental and simulation results for γ-ray shielding performance

Researches on advanced composites to protect environment health towards radioactive pollution have drawn attention with the rising use of radioactive elements. From this point, polymer micro composites are quite encouraging in terms of multifunctional properties in mechanical, electrical, thermal, as well as nuclear shielding. The present study has explored the efficacy of micro lead (Pb) loaded polymer composites for radio protective applications such as a fabrication of protective enclosures. High energetic photon shielding experiments have been applied through gamma spectrometer equipped with HPGe detector and various radioactive point sources namely 137Cs, 22Na, 152Eu, 133Ba, 241Am and 57,60Co which are widely used in several medical and industrial applications. The results demonstrated that mass attenuation coefficients of the composites at different photon energies are proportional to the filler loading. The validation of FLUKA and GEANT4 Monte Carlo software has been performed in the simulation of transmission experiments as well as WinXCOM software. The tests of the Pb (20%) micro composite for the nuclear radiation shielding reveal that it has high attenuation coefficients for photon radiation.