Morphology-tailored microwave absorption in MOF-derived Co9S8/Co@N, S dual-doped carbon composites via ligand-exchange induced progressive hollow engineering

Abstract

Flexible manipulations of morphology and composition have been considered as an art to achieve excellent microwave absorption performance for absorbers derived from metal-organic frameworks (MOFs). In this work, a strategy combining ligand-exchange induced hollow engineering and high-temperature one-step sulfuration has been proposed to fabricate the Co9S8/Co@N, S dual-doped carbon-based absorbers with tailored solid, yolk-shelled and entirely hollow polyhedral morphologies. The progressive hollow engineering not only enables composition control in the sulfuration process, but also endows the proposed absorbers with superior microwave absorption capacity due to the enhanced conductivity loss and Maxwell-Wagner polarization as well as optimized impedance matching. The yolk-shelled Co9S8/Co@N, S dual-doped carbon-based composite achieves a broad effective absorption bandwidth of 5.13 GHz at 1.88 mm with 20 wt% loading and realizes a minimum microwave loss of − 51.78 dB @ 11.63 GHz with 2.37 mm. This work reveals that the joint strategy of ligand-exchange induced hollow engineering and gas-solid reactive thermal process is an effective path to construct high-efficient lightweight multi-interfacial microwave absorbers for addressing the electromagnetic pollutions.