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Carbon aerogel microspheres with in-situ mineralized TiO2 for efficient microwave absorption

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Abstract

Carbon aerogels (CAs) have been considered potential microwave absorption (MA) materials because of intrinsic hierarchical porous structure, low density, and excellent heat resistance. However, CAs always required to be ground into micron-scale powder before being used as microwave absorbers, which will inevitably destroy the hierarchical porous structure. Meanwhile, reproducing the optimized CAs powders is difficult. Herein, CAs microspheres with in-situ mineralized TiO2 were easily prepared via a sol-gel transition and calcination process. The uniform size of CA microspheres and the loaded TiO2 on the skeleton of CA yield great microwave attenuation performance while guaranteeing good impedance matching performance. The obtained TiO2/CA hybrid presented a minimum reflection loss value of −30.2 dB and a broad effective absorption bandwidth (reflection loss below −10 dB) of 6.2 GHz. The low density, MA performance, and controllable particle size make the novel TiO2/CA hybrid promising candidates for MA applications.

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Acknowledgements

The authors gratefully acknowledge financial support from the National Key Research and Development Program of China (No. 2018YFB0704200), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 51973142 and 21878194), and Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (No. YJ2021145).

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  1. Yue-Yi Wang and Jin-Long Zhu contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Sichuan University, Chengdu, 610065, China

    Yue-Yi Wang, Nan Li, Jun-Feng Shi & Ding-Xiang Yan

  2. College of Polymer Science and Engineering, State Key Laboratory of Polymer Materials Engineering, Sichuan University, Chengdu, 610065, China

    Jin-Long Zhu & Zhong-Ming Li

  3. College of Chemical Engineering, Sichuan University, Chengdu, 610065, China

    Jian-Hua Tang

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  1. Yue-Yi Wang
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Wang, YY., Zhu, JL., Li, N. et al. Carbon aerogel microspheres with in-situ mineralized TiO2 for efficient microwave absorption. Nano Res. 15, 7723–7730 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12274-022-4494-0

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