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Comparative studies on physical and chemical routes for animal waste-derived activated carbon for microwave absorption in the X-band

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Abstract

Electromagnetic pollution is a great concern in the present day. Activated carbon derived from waste sources can prove to be a green and cost-effective solution in this situation. In this work, a comparative study has been conducted to explore the potential of cowdung (animal waste)-derived activated carbon towards microwave absorption. Cowdung, which is abundantly available in the environment as a source of biomass, is used as the filler after being activated through two different routes, physical (carbonization) and chemical (acid and base activation). Due to the properties of being lightweight, flexible, corrosion resistive and having ease of large area fabrication, polydimethyl siloxane (PDMS) elastomer has been chosen as a matrix for the composites. Characterizations such as SEM, XRD and FTIR were performed to investigate the morphological and the functionalities present in the porous carbon structure. BET was further performed to investigate parameters such as specific surface area and pore volumes of the samples. Apart from the contribution from interfacial polarization owing to the dielectric properties of the filler material, the induced porosity resulted in hollow carbon structures which contributed to the microwave absorbing properties by scattering and reflecting the incident radiation. In the systems studied, the physically activated samples and the H2SO4-activated sample amongst chemical-activated samples are seen to reach values of ~ − 25 dB thickness as low as 4 mm. The best result is seen correspond to the composite carbonized at 600 °C, which shows ~ − 26 dB of microwave absorption with a bandwidths below − 10 dB (which corresponds to 90% absorption) ranging over 2 GHz. Hence these results indicate the suitability of these systems for real-time applications electronic system shielding.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to acknowledge ARDB grant ARDB/01/2031900/M/I and Prof. K. J. Vinoy, Department of ECE, Indian Institute of Science (IISc) for providing the VNA facility for measurements.

Funding

The authors would like to acknowledge ARDB grant ARDB/01/2031900/M/I for funding.

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Author notes

  1. Sutripto Khasnabis and Meghana Jois HS have contributed equally.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Materials Engineering, Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, 560012, India

    Sutripto Khasnabis, Meghana Jois HS & Praveen C. Ramamurthy

  2. National University of Singapore (NUS), Singapore, 119077, Singapore

    Pritom Jyoti Bora

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  1. Sutripto Khasnabis
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  2. Meghana Jois HS
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Khasnabis, S., HS, M.J., Bora, P.J. et al. Comparative studies on physical and chemical routes for animal waste-derived activated carbon for microwave absorption in the X-band. J Mater Sci: Mater Electron 33, 3425–3437 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10854-021-07224-3

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