Effect of Cerium (IV) Oxide Particle Size on Polydimethylsiloxane Polymer to Form Flexible Materials against Ionizing Radiation

This study aims to investigate the impact of CeO(2) content and particle size on the radiation shielding abilities of polydimethylsiloxane, also known as silicon rubber (SR). We prepared different SR samples with 10, 30, and 50% of micro and nano CeO(2) and we measured the linear attenuation coefficient (LAC) for these samples. We found that the LAC of the SR increases by increasing the CeO(2) and all prepared SR samples had higher LACs than the pure SR. We examined the effect of the size of the particles on the LAC and the results demonstrated that the LAC for nano CeO(2) is higher than that of micro CeO(2). We investigated the half value layer (HVL) for the prepared SR samples and the results revealed that the SR with 10% micro CeO(2) had a greater HVL than the SR with 10% nano CeO(2). The HVL results demonstrated that the SR containing nanoparticles had higher attenuation effectiveness than the SR with micro CeO(2). We also prepared SR samples containing CeO(2) in both sizes (i.e., micro and nano) and we found that the HVL of the SR containing both sizes was lower than the HVL of the SR with nano CeO(2). The radiation protection efficiency (RPE) at 0.059 MeV for the SR with 10% micro and nano CeO(2) was 94.2 and 95.6%, respectively, while the RPE of SR containing both sizes (5% micro CeO(2) + 5% micro CeO(2)) was 96.1% at the same energy. The RPE results also indicated that the attenuation ability was improved when utilizing the micro and nano CeO(2) as opposed to the micro CeO(2) or nano CeO(2) at 0.662, 1.173, and 1.333 MeV.