Multiaxial electrospun generation of hollow graphene aerogel spheres for broadband high-performance microwave absorption

Abstract

Although graphene aerogels (GA) have been attracted great attention, the easy-operation and large-scale production of GA are still challenges. Further, most GA have a monolith-like appearance, limiting their application-specific needs. Herein, we highlight graphene aerogel spheres with controllable hollow structures (HGAS) that are delicately designed and manufactured via coaxial electrospinning coupled with freeze-drying and calcination. The HGAS exhibit a spherical configuration at the macroscale, while the construction elements of graphene on the microscale showing an interconnected radial microchannel structure. Further, ball-in-ball graphene aerogel spheres (BGAS) are obtained by reference to the triaxial electrospinning technology. The as-prepared spheres possess the controllable integrated conductive networks, leading to the effective dielectric loss and impedance matching, thus bringing on high-performance microwave absorption. The as-obtained HGAS shows a minimum reflection loss of -52.7 dB, and a broad effective absorption bandwidth (fE) of 7.0 GHz with thickness of 2.3 mm. Further, the fE reaches 9.3 GHz for BGAS with thickness of 3.4 mm. Aforementioned superior microwave absorption of HGAS and BGAS confirms combination of multiaxial electrospinning and freeze-drying on the multiscale is an effective strategy for scalable fabrication of advanced microwave absorbing functional graphene aerogel spheres.