Determination of radiation shielding properties of some building materials used as insulation material in buildings

The increased in technological devices used with the development of technology have caused radiation protection to become more important. With the development of suitable protective materials to reduce the radiation dose increasing in parallel with the developing technology, it is possible for living things to be affected by radiation at a minimum level (Mahesh, 2012). The most effective way of protection from radiation is to put a protective material between the radiation source and the radiation source. This method is called the "shielding" method. Since the importance of shielding in radiation protection is known, studies in which different shielding materials are tried to be developed in almost every field working with radiation are important studies. In the literature, there are many materials in which radiation shielding properties such as concrete, steel, metal, etc. are investigated. As is known, concrete and lead are used as standard radiation shielding materials. Concrete is widely used for gamma ray shielding and is an inexpensive material (Akkurt et al., 2012). It is easy to supply, but it has disadvantages such as high sensitivity to moisture, lack of transparency, crack formation exposed to radiation, impermeable visible light and inactivity (Ersundu et al., 2018). As lead is a material that is both costly and technically impossible to use on every platform, it is important to identify new armoring materials. Also, considering that we spend 80% of our lives in closed environments (UNSCEAR, 2010), it is important to know what degree of radiation scavenging the materials used in the structure of the environment have. For this reason, in this study, the radiation shielding properties of various materials used as insulation materials in buildings were investigated using the gamma spectrometer with detector with a 3"x3" NaI(Tl) detector.