Constructing excellent electromagnetic wave absorber with dielectric-dielectric media based on 3D reduced graphene and Ag(I)-Schiff base coordination compounds

The dielectric-dielectric composite (SRGA) for electromagnetic absorber was fabricated via integrating Ag(I)-Schiff base coordination compounds (SSBCC) with three-dimensional reduced graphene aerogel (3D-rGA) powders. SRGA showed excellent electromagnetic wave absorption properties in terms of reflection loss, absorption band width and absorber thickness. Specially, when the mass ratio of SSBC to 3D-rGA powders was 1:3 (SRGA-25), the maximum value of reflection loss at 2 mm was up to −63.82 dB and the effective frequency bandwidth of 6.28 GHz (10.16–16.44 GHz) at 2.5 mm can be obtained. The mechanism investigation of electromagnetic wave absorption for SRGA showed that the enhanced electromagnetic wave absorption was ascribed to enhanced polarization loss derived from good 3D-conductive-network units of 3D-rGA, abundant interfaces caused by the media heterostructure due to the introduction of SSBCC and the good impedance matching condition. And 3D-rGA based materials might be put into practical application only in powder state due to the very low strength of the buck state. Therefore, the investigation on SRGA in our contribution is considered to be an actual performance evaluation of the materials based on three-dimensional graphene for microwave attenuation. This work also provided a method for fabricating excellent graphene-based electromagnetic wave absorbers by simply mixing a suitable dielectric lossy material, e.g. SSBCC.