In-situ preparation of Fe9S10/Carbon composites with well electromagnetic wave absorber properties by using PAES as porous precursor

Abstract

In this work, using porous PAES as the precursor, a series of Fe9S10/Carbon composites (PAES-Fe) with excellent electromagnetic wave (EMW) absorbing features were successfully prepared via in situ oxidation technique. The analysis results indicate that the obtained composite material has characteristics such as multi-level pore structure and large specific surface area. Its excellent EMW absorption mechanism is mainly attributed to conductive loss, interface polarization, and dipole polarization. Most importantly, by adjusting the type of Polyvinyl Pyrrolidone (PVP), the pore size of the composite can be optimized to obtain the best impedance matching. The as-prepared PAES-Fe nanomaterials presented the attractive EMW absorption performance in terms of reflection loss (RL), absorption bandwidth as well as absorption layer thickness. When controlling the composite macropore size at 2 μm, the mesoporous pore size was 2–6 nm, the specific surface area was 189.2 m2/g, and the pore volume (PV) reached 0.130 cm3/g. With the thickness of 2 mm, the minimum RL of PAES-Fe-P reached −31.313 dB at 5.46 GHz. Hence, this type of nanocomposites with tunable pore size characteristics and hierarchical pore structure may have enormous potential for application of EMW absorbers.