Fabrication of Fe/Fe3C-nanoparticles encapsulated nitrogen-doped carbon nanotubes with thin wall thickness as high-efficiency electromagnetic wave absorbing materials

Abstract

Nitrogen-doped bamboo-like carbon nanotubes with embedded Fe/Fe3C nanoparticles (NPs) (Fe/Fe3C@NCNTs) were successfully fabricated by the pyrolysis of the metal organic framework. When the pyrolysis temperature was 800 °C, the length and diameter of NCNTs were in the ranges 8–20 µm and 17–130 nm, respectively. Remarkably, the wall thickness of the NCNTs was merely 5.0 nm. The Fe/Fe3C@NCNTs-800 exhibits enhanced dielectric and magnetic loss performance attributing to its excellent electrical conductivity, massive interfaces between Fe/Fe3C and NCNTs, and a large number of defects and void spaces between bamboo joints. In addition, the Fe/Fe3C@NCNTs-800 also has outstanding impedance matching characteristic, and thus its minimal reflection loss and effective absorption bandwidth reached −50.8 dB with a thickness of 1.6 mm and 4.3 GHz with a thickness of 1.4 mm, respectively. The results of this study demonstrate the Fe/Fe3C@NCNTs-800 as a promising candidate for electromagnetic wave absorption.