Assessment of annual effective dose from radionuclides in paint materials using High Purity Germanium detector

The main focus of this study is to investigate the radioactivity concentration, and the hazardous effects of using paint materials for decorative purposes which are available on the market. The gamma radiation from these collected paint samples is detected by using the High-Purity Germanium (HPGe) detector. A total of 20 samples from four brands and five different colours of each brand were collected for this experiment. From this study, the activity concentrations of Ra-226, Th-232 and K-40 in paint samples were found to be varied from 2.20 ± 0.98 to 60.22 ± 7.37 Bq kg⁻¹ with an average value of 20.88 ± 4.05 Bq kg⁻¹, 8.01 ± 3.54 to 87.07 ± 7.68 Bq kg⁻¹ with an average value 28.19 ± 7.70 Bq kg⁻¹ and 21.98 ± 19.39 to 517.92 ± 47.08 Bq kg⁻¹ with an average value 221.70 ± 32.06 Bq kg⁻¹, respectively. The total annual effective dose rate ranges from 0.04 to 0.25 mSvy⁻¹ with an average of 0.15 mSvy⁻¹.