Modern heavyweight concrete shielding: Principles, industrial applications and future challenges; review
Introduction
Concrete is one of the world's most popular building materials with an average intake of 1 m3/person per year [1]. One of the most critical materials used for radiation protection in installations containing radiation generating equipment and radioactive sources is the heavyweight concrete [2]. The reason is that concrete is a relatively cheap material that can be easily handled and cast into complex forms. It contains a mixture of many heavy and light elements and thus has good characteristics for neutron and photon attenuation [3]. Heavyweight concrete (HWC) is used in nuclear engineering in biological shields or shielding walls in a reactor store, as described in Ref. [4]. In general, the thick concrete layers cover nuclear reactors for two roles: supporting the reactor and its related equipment and protecting the environment from the reactor emitting high-level radiations [5,6]. With the modernization of radiotherapy centers, 60Co is mainly replaced by medical linear accelerators in radiotherapy units where the impermeability of radiation is necessary [7,8]. The two most important features in these facilities are earthquake resistance represented by the building's strength, and radiation insulation expressed as radiation attenuation. When environmental conservation is now a big concern, further attempts must be made to consider HWC and its structural behavior.
The rise in incidents of radionuclide released from various sources, as well as safety and environmental concerns, are a growing concern for radiation shielding. Several experiments have also been carried out to discover potential approaches that can provide efficient radiation attenuation materials for nuclear applications. These materials include concrete mixes [9,10], modified cement pastes [[11], [12], [13]], glass materials [14], polymers [4,8,[15], [16], [17]], bricks [16,18,19], and rocks [18,20]. Nonetheless, because of their high resilience and structural properties, concrete mixtures are the most common and practical shielding material [10]. As stated earlier, HWC has superior shielding capability compared to normal-weight concrete. For special facilities such as medical centers that are typically exposed to X-ray or gamma-ray radiation, the radiation shielding properties of concrete are important to minimize the adverse effects of these radiations [21] and delaying the aging of the structure [[22], [23], [24]]. The thick walls of nuclear facilities limit the available space and pose an architectural obstacle. So, the use of HWC eliminates the need to use these thick walls [25] by modifying the engineering properties of HWC [26] and increase thermal resistance characteristics of the HWC [27]. Several studies have been conducted in this regard to study the viability of using various types of heavy waste aggregate to improve the radiation protection capacity of concrete.
The concrete's physical and mechanical properties, which may influence the shielding performance, can vary depending on the concrete composition. Aggregates are the most important constituent of HWC (about 70–80% of the concrete's total weight). Therefore, the content and type of aggregates are important factors that influence the concrete's properties. Various types of natural and artificial aggregates are used to reinforce the concrete's properties [28,29]. Special heavy aggregates, such as magnetite, electrical arc furnace slag, hematite, ilmenite and cast iron or steel scrap, may be used to produce radiation shielding concrete [[30], [31], [32], [33], [34], [35]]. Hence, it is the role of researchers to find inexpensive and effective materials available locally in each country [28]. HWC has many desirable properties from the point of view of nuclear radiation shielding. These properties can be modified to suit specific shielding needs. Such needs fall into categories such as higher neutron and attenuating gamma performance [36,37]. The heavyweight aggregate is a common material used to make concrete for the protection of radiation to meet these requirements. The physical and mechanical properties of concrete must be taken into account as is the case in focusing on the properties of radiation insulation. It is because the concrete used in structures requiring radiation attenuation must have predefined engineering features, such as earthquake-resistance, mechanical strength and maximizing the structural service life.
Concrete is considered as a three-phase composite material comprising of aggregate, cement paste and the interfacial zone between the aggregate and cement paste. As the mechanical strength of the concrete depends mainly on the adhesion between the cement paste and the aggregate, failures occur within the cement paste and along the interfacial zone [33,38,39]. Therefore, attention should be paid to the effect of aggregate type, micro admixtures, nano admixtures, and fibres (single or hybrid) on the paste-aggregate bond. The definition, historical development, components and properties of HWC have been reviewed in the previous study [28,40].
It is necessary to provide a comprehensive review of the theory of radiation shielding of cementitious composites and the current advances in radiation shielding HWC. As elaborated earlier, HWC has superior shielding capability as compared to the normal-weight concrete. Therefore, the general concept of high energy radiations and the geometric design considerations of radiation shielding structures are reviewed in the present work. Besides, the compositions of modern HWC materials and the industrial applications of HWC are discussed in-depth based on the most recent research findings. The review can be used for technical guideline review, engineering reference, and a knowledge framework for further development of HWC. The most significant contributions of the work is a comprehensive review of recent advances on the development of HWC. Besides, the work also highlights the main challenges encountered in the development of HWC and the limitations of the most current scientific knowledge framework of HWC.
Section snippets
General high energy radiation physics concept
Ionizing radiation occurs in nature in earth crust compounds that consist of heavy radionuclides such as uranium (235U, 238U), thorium (232Th), potassium (4 K), and rubidium (87Rb). Such radionuclides themselves contain radioactive atoms in gaseous or liquid form [41]. One example of ionizing radiation is gamma-rays, that is released from radioactive nuclei. Gamma-rays are nearly similar to X-rays, excluding that X-rays are artificially created and produced from the electron cloud around the
Fundamental of geometrical calculations for radiation attenuation of concrete
The thickness of the radiation shield can be calculated in all techniques by using the Beer-Lambert law, as equation (1) [54]:where and is the radiation intensity before and after passing the absorber, respectively, μ is the linear attenuation coefficient and x is the absorber thickness. The linear attenuation coefficient is directly proportional to the absorber density and the atomic number and inversely to the photon energy.
The effective atomic number is the proportion of the total
Recent advances in development of HWC to isolate harmful radiation
HWC is considered to be one of the most important material for radiation attenuation because it protects the environment and humankind in general from harmful high energy radiations. It is mainly used for the isolation of radiation with strong penetration, the most famous of which are X-rays and gamma-rays. As a result, it was decided that researchers should proceed with the development of this kind of concrete. In this section, we are interested in presenting the most important factors which
Industrial applications of HWC
Industrial applications are the most important feature of HWC. As scientific research in the field of HWC applications has expanded to a considerable extent, it makes it more important and encourages researchers to continue to expand HWC applications. In this section, we discuss the most recent findings of the researchers on HWC applications.
As a result of previous review studies carried out by the researchers [28] concerning HWC, it issued a classification of HWC as the concrete with density
Future challenges and current research limitations
At present, challenges have been identified in the development of HWC in various ways due to the expansion of nuclear laboratories, radioactive metal stores, hospitals and nuclear power plants. Such construction work requires more HWC materials to be consumed, and it leads to an increase in the cost of materials. Hence, the biggest challenge is finding low-cost materials suitable for use as a constituent material for HWC. Three-quarters of concrete materials are made up of aggregate [28,72,73].
Conclusions
A thorough understanding of the mechanism of radiation penetration and radiation-matter interaction is one of the most important principles that must be addressed to achieve optimal radiation isolation property of HWC. Recent advancements in the field of knowledge had established several equations concerning the appropriate width of HWC embodiment in isolating harmful radiation. Studies are still in the process of developing equations to suit the structure type. The design and installation of
Declaration of competing interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
Acknowledgement
The contribution of financial support by the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation (MOSTI) of Malaysia through the International Collaboration Fund (ICF) (Reference. No. IF0420I1224) with the project title “The optimization of mineral processing of coal bottom ash for large volume reuse as constituent binder and aggregate for concrete production at industrial scale”.
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