Biomass-derived porous carbon for microwave absorption

Abstract

Biomass-derived porous carbon materials have gained increasing interests for multifunctional applications due to their light weight, large specific surface, low cost, and sustainability. Developing and efficiently utilizing new biomass-derived porous carbons for high-performance applications in a facile and scalable manufacturing approach is crucial yet remains challenging. Here, we efficiently prepare a kind of pine needle-derived carbons with abundant hierarchical pores and controllable electrical properties. This contributes to the development of a high-performance microwave absorbing architecture with a reflection loss of −56.3 dB at a thickness of 1.4 mm and an effective absorption bandwidth of 3.44 GHz at a thickness of 1.4 mm. The excellent microwave absorption performance is mainly attributed to the synergistic coactions of the impedance matching, conduction loss, polarization loss, and multiple scatterings derived from the facile design of the porous carbons. Combined with the cost-efficient and scalable manufacturing approach, our lightweight, durable, and high-performance biomass-derived carbons offer huge potentials for electromagnetic wave absorbing applications in aircraft, spacecraft, and electromagnetic compatible devices.