Light and Flexible Composite Nanofibrous Membranes for High-Efficiency Electromagnetic Absorption in a Broad Frequency

With the fast advancement of up-to-date communication technologies, electromagnetic wave (EMW) absorption materials are widely required for various applications. However, it is still a big challenge to produce lightweight, flexible, and high-efficiency EMW absorption materials in a broad-ranging frequency. Herein, we designed to fabricate the magnetic and dielectric nanofibrous membranes which can be effectively used as EMW absorption materials by facile electrospinning process. The as-fabricated composite carbon nanofibers (CNFs), which combined the components of nickel, cobalt antioxidant nanoparticles, and carbon nanotubes, exhibited outstanding magnetic and dielectric properties and strong absorption ability in a wide frequency range. These nanoparticles encapsulated in CNFs are extremely beneficial to the electrical conductivity of the composites through decreasing the contact loss within the CNFs by formation of the metal–metal interfaces. Correspondingly, the RL value of −46.60 dB was reached at 4.88 GHz frequency range with a layer thickness of 5.5 mm for these mechanically light and flexible membranes. The enhanced absorption performance (<−10 dB) in the wide frequency band (4.16–18 GHz) can be achieved by selecting a suitable thickness of the material. Results demonstrate that the permittivity and permeability of developed samples have been largely improved because of the integrated interaction of all introduced components in the structure. The composite membranes are a promising candidate for scalable, lightweight, and high-performance EMW absorption materials in the frequency range from C band to Ku band (4–18 GHz).