Tungsten for radiation shielding use
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Tungsten for radiation shielding use
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Re: Tungsten for radiation shielding use
#2Neat. If I was in dentistry or oncology I'd print a tungsten apron like a suit of armour for kids, or perhaps a nice comfy/adjustable thyroid collar which isn't too tight or tall. With filament at $230 a kilo it might not be economically feasible but it sure would look cool.
Re: Tungsten for radiation shielding use
#3I printed a hat. Works great for the silent radio waves that the government uses to control your mind.
Re: Tungsten for radiation shielding use
#4In other words: you need less tungsten than lead to get similar shielding results.
But the tungsten costs many times more, and is also much harder unlike lead which is soft and easily worked, which is why radiation shielding is still overwhelmingly made of lead. In applications where its toxicity is a problem, it's used encapsulated inside another inert material.
Re: Tungsten for radiation shielding use
#5I printed a hat. Works great for the silent radio waves that the government uses to control your mind.
Good neck workout too.
Re: Tungsten for radiation shielding use
#6In other words: you need less tungsten than lead to get similar shielding results. But the tungsten costs many times more, and is also much harder unlike lead which is soft and easily worked, which is why radiation shielding is still overwhelmingly made of lead. In applications where its toxicity is a problem, it's used encapsulated inside another inert material.
Sure, if you want to shield a wall or container or something you will just slap lead on it, but this could be used for complex shielding of sensitive components in nuclear machinery and devices. Machining hard materials is extremely expensive and difficult (exotic material cutters or edm, with slow high precision grinding).
Re: Tungsten for radiation shielding use
#7In other words: you need less tungsten than lead to get similar shielding results. But the tungsten costs many times more, and is also much harder unlike lead which is soft and easily worked, which is why radiation shielding is still overwhelmingly made of lead. In applications where its toxicity is a problem, it's used encapsulated inside another inert material.
Sure, if you want to shield a wall or container or something you will just slap lead on it, but this could be used for complex shielding of sensitive components in nuclear machinery and devices. Machining hard materials is extremely expensive and difficult (exotic material cutters or edm, with slow high precision grinding).
lead isn't a hard material, and if you need a hard material, this filament isn't what you're looking for either; it will be almost as fragile as pure petg
Re: Tungsten for radiation shielding use
#8Interesting! I'm designing the flight computer/electronics of a 2U cubesat for academia, and something like this might work really well for our application. We were considering borated polyethylene but the cost for that is prohibitive. This is perhaps not as efficient in terms of mass-to-protection ratio, but we have plenty more room in our mass budget instead of actual budget. I also like the idea that we may be able to mold this material around particularly sensitive elements of our system like the memory devices, to which neutrons are the biggest hazard.
Re: Tungsten for radiation shielding use
#9this sounds more entertaining for 3-d printing things that startle people by being staggeringly heavy rather than things that are actually useful
it should be heavier than lead; lead is only 11.3 g/cc, tungsten is 19.3, 75% tungsten would be 14.5, but then the other 25% is petg with sp.gr. ≈ 1 so you should actually get a density of 14.7
but i struggle to imagine cases where using tungsten is a more cost-effective option than using lead and making the object 9% bigger? they cite 'various medical applications' but tungsten isn't exactly ideal for permanent body contact either
oh actually they say it's 75% tungsten by mass, not volume, so it's only 4 g/cc, and so its attenuation (at 140keV) is only 18% of lead's (by volume)
copper might be an alternative that is less toxic than lead and less expensive than tungsten
Re: Tungsten for radiation shielding use
#10this sounds more entertaining for 3-d printing things that startle people by being staggeringly heavy rather than things that are actually useful it should be heavier than lead; lead is only 11.3 g/cc, tungsten is 19.3, 75% tungsten would be 14.5, but then the other 25% is petg with sp.gr. ≈ 1 so you should actually get a density of 14.7 but i struggle to imagine cases where using tungsten is a more cost-effective op…
I'd think the public palatability of lead products is one aspect. People don't worry as much about tungsten.
I was thinking weights to fit specific items. Model railway wagons, for example, need to be weighted and balanced to operate smoothly, but you have significant size constraints. I threw a bunch of tungsten weights inside a small locomotive to give it extra tractive effort.