Attenuation or “core” material is used to protect from radiation, whether it be in aprons for medical facilities, scanning baggage and cargo, scanning food, or building materials. Wherever there is radiation, it shields!
When it comes to attenuation materials, Complete Medical Australasia offers a variety of options using two distinct processes: curing or extrusion. These different manufacturing processes each result in unique qualities and benefits.
Our attenuation materials have outperformed competitors’ materials in independent laboratory tests and provide superior radiation protection over an extended range of X-ray energies. For instance, independent testing shows significantly superior toughness of our attenuation materials made with our patent-protected proprietary elastomer, allowing for our materials’ greater flexibility and durability. Moreover, the careful selection of the protective metals, their particle sizes, and particle size distributions using nanotechnology enables us to provide superior radiation protection against primary and scattered X-rays.
Most attenuation material manufacturers employ the conventional thermal curing method, which involves spreading of a viscous mixture on a flat support surface, followed by heating, thermal baking, and rolling the final solidified sheet. This method produces high-quality radiation-protective, yet flexible sheets, that can be utilized in diverse environments where primary and scatter radiation is present. Most often, the mixture is mixed using metals, such as lead, tungsten, antimony, barium, and bismuth, in a vinyl-based elastomer. Vinyl-based attenuation materials are more cost-effective but still satisfactory for many applications without compromising integrity and protection level.
A modern technology for the production of radiation-protective materials is the extrusion process. Raw protective metals, such as tungsten, antimony, bismuth, barium, and lead, are uniformly mixed in a suitable elastomeric matrix (vinyl-based, polyolefin-based, and others) with the aid of high shear and heat and are subsequently pelletized. Afterward, the pellets (one, two, or more types of pellets) are fed into the extruder, where the final sheets of attenuation material are produced.
Our powerful lead-free radiation protection is of impressive versatility.
Producing attenuation material with the extrusion method ensures better control of the process parameters during the manufacturing process compared to the conventional thermal curing method. The extrusions process enables better quality control of the final attenuation materials. Extrusion also allows for the use of nanotechnology and nano materials for the components.
