Synergistically enhanced flexibility, mechanical strength and microwave absorption performances of TPE-based hybrid films via thermally assisted homogeneous separation technology

Abstract

With the ever-growing electromagnetic (EM) wave pollution and the rising demand of flexible absorbing materials pasted onto the surfaces of different geometric surfaces, it is urgent to develop high-efficiency EM wave absorption films with good flexibility and mechanical strength. Traditional processing methods endow the film superior features that can be adapted to targeted geometric surfaces and complex conditions, however, the durability is not satisfactory. Confronted with the tough problem, in this work, optimized thermally assisted homogeneous separation technology was proposed to fabricate the thermoplastic elastomer-based magnetic/dielectric two-phase mixed EM wave absorption films, which can achieve good flexibility, machinability, mechanical strength, as well as excellent EM wave absorption performances due to the uniform filling of elastoplastic skeletons and chain-bridge effect between chains and particles. Benefitting from these merits, the as-prepared films exhibit good flexibility and fine mechanical properties, like good deformability (300% of the deformation compared to its original length) and low elastic coefficient (323.8 Pa). Moreover, good EM wave absorption performances can also be balanced, for example, broad effective bandwidth (>14 GHz) and tunable frequency response from high frequency to low frequency. In all, this work opens up a new pathway to realize the integration of strong EM response, good flexibility, and fine mechanical properties, and the obtained films exhibit great potentials as flexible EM wave absorption materials that can be pasted on or peeled off the targeted surfaces at any time.