Maximizing the microwave absorption performance of polypyrrole by data-driven discovery

Abstract

Microwave-absorbing materials (MAMs) have played critical roles in many civil and military applications, such as coating materials on stealth fighters to avoid radar detections. The efficacy of MAMs is evaluated with the reflection loss (RL) and the bandwidth (Δf10, which refers to the band where ≥90% microwave irradiation is lost), along with the peak's position (fmax) and the thickness of the coating. Large RL and Δf10 are frequency targeted for optimized performance. In this study, we demonstrate a data-driven discovery approach to reveal the maximized RL and Δf10, using a polypyrrole/paraffin composite as an example, and found that record-setting RL of −62.6 dB and Δf10 of 7.7 GHz, are obtained, as the best values that have been reported for polypyrrole. We believe that this data-driven approach can be widely applied to other composite systems, to allow more exciting discoveries in the future.