Controllable thermal treatment of reduced graphene oxide for tunable electromagnetic wave absorption performance

Abstract

The complex process of reduced graphene oxide (RGO) preparation hindered its merits of lightweight, high surface area, and notable dielectric loss in electromagnetic (EM) wave absorption performance. This work introduced a controllable ethanol-assisted hydrothermal and annealing treatment to simplify the preparation of RGO with improved agglomeration and achieved tunable EM wave absorption performance. Among series of RGO materials fabricated with different annealing temperatures, the optimized RGO achieves a strong reflection loss of −49.9 dB with a thickness of 3.9 mm, and a broad effective absorption bandwidth of 7.65 GHz with a thickness of 3.1 mm based on a 2 wt% filler content in the matrix. The vacancy defect density and C/O ratio of RGO were demonstrated to be correlated to the behavior of conductive loss and polarization relaxation for RGO and the interface reflection of EM wave. This controllable thermal treatment successfully enabled the simple preparation of RGO with reduced agglomeration and tunable EM wave absorption and effectively contributed to fabricating other carbon-based dielectric/magnetic materials as high-efficiency electromagnetic absorbers in future.