Theoretical and simulation assessment of shielding features of the B2O3-PbO-SiO2-Dy2O3 glass system using GEANT4 and MCNP codes, and online software for X-ray energy range

Abstract

Study the shielding properties of materials against charged and non-charged particles is a vital issue in the present era. In this paper, GEANT4, MCNP, XCOM, Phy-X/PSD, EpiXS, and NGCal programs were applied to evaluated shielding characterization of the B2O3-PbO-SiO2-Dy2O3 glass system against photons with the energy range of 10–100 keV. LAC, MAC, HVL, TVL, MFP, Zeff, Neff, and Zeq parameters were computed using the mentioned software. The simulated values were compared to each other, which the good compatibility between them was shown. As can be seen from the figures and tables, with increasing the amount of Dy2O3, MAC and LAC values rise. Therefore, dy5 with the most values of MAC was selected as the most favorable shield against X-ray photons.