Application of experiment and simulation to estimate radiation shielding capacity of various rocks

Most of the construction material originated from the rock which either used directly or as aggregate in concrete production. As in radiation protection selecting shielding material is important and thus radiation shielding properties should be known. In this study, the linear attenuation coefficients (μ, cm -1 ) of gamma ray have been measured at 0.511, 0.835, and 1.275 MeV for four different igneous rocks which are widely used in industrial field using. The measurement was performed using gamma spectrometer contains NaI(Tl) detector. The measured results were compared with the calculation obtained using Phy-X/PSD software. Besides linear attenuation coefficients, some other important parameters such as mean free path (mfp), half value length (HVL), tenth value length (TVL), effective atomic number (Z eff ), electron density (N eff ), equivalent atomic number (Z eq ), exposure buildup factor (EBF), fast neutron removal cross section (FNRC), and Zeq were also obtained. It has been found that energy dependence and rock types are important in terms of radiatiob shielding.