Aluminum nitride-enhanced spherical-like Fe3O4 nanoparticles decorating reduced graphene oxide hybrid composites with superior microwave absorption performance

Abstract

With the quick development of up-to-date social informatization, a harm of ubiquitous microwave absorption (MA) has become a significant issue to environment, communication industry, and human health. It is still a challenge to design high-performance absorbing materials to eliminate the harm of MA. In this work, the reduced oxide graphene (rGO) sheets decorated by aluminum nitride (AlN) and spherical-like structures of Fe₃O₄ nanoparticles were successfully fabricated via a one-pot solvothermal method. The rGO/Fe₃O₄/AlN hybrid composites as microwave absorbers exhibited superior MA performance by tuning the content ratio of Fe₃O₄ to AlN and the mass ratio of rGO/Fe₃O₄/AlN to paraffin was 3:7. Significantly, the minimum reflection loss (RL_min) value of rGO/Fe₃O₄/AlN-paraffin was − 59.39 dB at 14.24 GHz with a thickness of only 1.8 mm and the effective absorption bandwidth was 5.68 GHz (12.32–18 GHz) when the content ratio of Fe₃O₄ to AlN was 1:1.5. The introduction of proper content of AlN could enable excellent MA performance of hybrid composites due to the enhancement of the impedance matching and synergistic effect. Therefore, our present work may build up a new strategy for developing prospect MA materials with practical applications by facile preparation routes and low production cost control.