Investigating the impact of gamma radiation on optical and structural properties of malaysian and sudanese gum arabic under different annealing temperatures and durations

The aim of this paper is to study the effects of gamma radiation on the structural and optical properties of two types of Gum Arabic, one from Sudan and another from Malaysia. The Gum Arabic samples were first annealed at different temperatures and for different durations before being irradiated using Am-241 gamma ray for 72 hours. Both the irradiated and non-irradiated samples were then examined using various characterization methods to gain insights into how gamma radiation alters the material’s structural and optical properties. Our study also compares between raw and annealed gum, Gum Arabic from Sudan and Malaysia, powder sample and nodular sample as well as different annealing temperatures and durations. Our results from X-ray diffraction (XRD) show that both annealing, and gamma irradiation have the tendency to alter the crystalline size of Gum Arabic. From the absorption spectra obtained using UV-Visible spectrophotometer, we observe that generally, both gamma irradiation and annealing temperature broadened the width of the absorption peak, except for Gum Arabic from Malaysia annealed at 150°C for 40 minutes where the absorption peak became narrower. The fluorescence spectra of our powder samples also show that the light emitted shifted from blue to yellow when annealing temperature increases but gamma irradiation exhibited insignificant effect on the spectra. However, the spectra for our sample in nodular show more sensitive response to gamma irradiation where the light emitted shifted from near yellow to white.