Graphene aerogel encapsulated double carbon shell CoFe@C@C nanocubes for construction of high performance microwave absorbing materials

Abstract

Recently, Prussian blue analogs (PBAs) have attracted much attention due to their transformation into dielectric/magnetic coupled composites after pyrolysis at high temperatures and their ability to maintain their basic morphology. However, designing efficient microwave-absorbing materials using PBAs is still a challenge. In this work, Co–Fe PBA was prepared by wet chemical method and graphene aerogel-encapsulated double carbon-shell CoFe@C@C nanocubes (CFCCG) were prepared by stirred self-polymerization and hydrothermal method, and heat-treated at different temperatures to obtain composites consisting of core-shell-structured PBA-derived particles encapsulated in a double layer of graphene and polydopamine (PDA). The addition of graphene not only reduces the density of the derived material but also effectively disperses the CoFe@C@C nanocubes to prevent the generated highly conductive carbon layer from adhering to improve the impedance matching, as well as introduces a large number of heterogeneous interfaces to improve the loss capability. Thanks to which the CFCCG7 composites have a reflection loss of −66.33 dB and an effective microwave absorption frequency covering the entire Ku-band. This work provides a new approach for rational design of multilayer carbon structure-coated PBA-based microwave absorbing materials.