Construction of lightweight NiCo-LDH/carbon fiber nanocomposites for broad-band microwave absorption

Abstract

The rapidly increasing usage of electric technology during the last decades has facilitated the fabrication of high-efficiency microwave absorption (MA) materials (MAMs). In this study, hierarchical NiCo layered double hydroxide (LDH)/carbon fiber (CF) nanocomposites were constructed via simple hydrothermal production, and their MA properties were evaluated. Benefiting from interfacial polarization, defect-induced polarization, and multiple reflections induced by the hierarchical sheets, the LDH/CF composites delivered a better MA performance than that by pure CF and LDH. The addition ratio of the LDH also played a vital role in determining the impedance matching and microwave absorption performance. Specifically, the optimized LDH/CF composites demonstrated an exceptional reflection loss (RL) of −62.47 dB with a thickness of 2.22 mm, and an effective absorption bandwidth (EAB) covering 6.4 GHz (11.6-18.0 GHz) at a 20 wt.% filling ratio, which outperformed the reported CF-based microwave absorbers. Owing to this superior MA, the as-prepared LDH/CF composites demonstrated to be significantly promising for advancing the usage of CF-based MAMs.

Keywords

Microwave absorption / Nickel cobalt layered double hydroxides / Carbon fiber / Interface polarization

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Shuangshuang Liu: Writing - original draft, Validation, Methodology, Investigation, Formal analysis, Conceptualization. Zhengying Shen: Validation, Investigation. Beibei Zhao: Supervision, Project administration. Nannan Wu: Writing - review & editing, Supervision, Software, Resources, Project administration, Funding acquisition, Conceptualization.

Acknowledgements

The authors acknowledge the support received from the Natural Science Foundation of the Shandong Province (ZR2021QE164).

Supplementary materials

Supplementary material associated with this article can be found, in the online version, at doi:10.1016/j.chphma.2024.01.002.

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