Co Nanoparticles Encapsulated in Carbon Nanotubes Decorated Carbon Aerogels Toward Excellent Microwave Absorption

Abstract

Here, a porous hybrid carbon aerogel (CNS/Co@NCNTs) is fabricated by growing cobalt nanoparticles in N-doped carbon nanotubes on three-dimensional (3D) continuous carbon nanosheets through a directional freeze-casting process and a carbonization process. The resulting hybrid carbon aerogels exhibit excellent attenuation performance owing to a unique 3D porous structure with a large surface, multiple interfaces, abundant defects, and efficient electron conductivity. Consequently, the optimized CNS/Co@NCNT-900 aerogel demonstrates extraordinary microwave absorption (MA) performance in terms of minimum reflection loss (−27.5 dB) and effective absorption bandwidth (7.4 GHz). This work proposes a novel approach for designing and fabricating highly effective magnetic porous hybrid carbon aerogels to be applied in MA fields.