Investigation of the gamma ray shielding properties for polyvinyl chloride reinforced with chalcocite and hematite minerals

Polyvinyl chloride (PVC) is the most widely produced synthetic plastic polymer in the world: it has a variety of applications due to its low cost, elasticity, light weight, good mechanical characteristics and corrosion resistance. In order to protect living beings from harmful radiation such as gamma rays, novel low-cost chalcocite and hematite-based PVCs were fabricated for shielding purposes. The mass attenuation coefficient mu(m) for various fabricated hematite and chalcocite-based PVCs was calculated using MCNP-5 code. The results were compared with the values calculated theoretically using XCOM software between 0.015 and 15 MeV. Moreover, the simulated mu(m) parameter for chalcocite/PVC and hematite/PVC was used to calculate other shielding factors, such as the half value layer (HVL), the mean free path (MFP) effective atomic number Z(eff), the geometric-progress (G-P) fitting parameters and the exposure buildup factor (EBF). The simulated data of mu(m) for all composites is comparable to that obtained from a theoretical calculation. The results showed that the addition of hematite and chalcocite enhance the mu(m) of PVC polymers. We also found that the mu(m) of chalcocite/PVC is higher than that of hematite/PVC due to the copper content in the former.