Facile synthesis of Fe3O4/reduced graphene oxide/polyvinyl pyrrolidone ternary composites and their enhanced microwave absorbing properties

In this paper, ternary nanocomposites of Fe 3 O 4 /reduced graphene oxide/polyvinyl pyrrolidone (Fe 3 O 4 /rGO/PVP) as a novel type of electromagnetic microwave absorbing materials were synthesized by a three-step chemical approach. First, Fe 3 O 4 nanospheres were made by solvent thermal method. Successively, the Fe 3 O 4 particles were assembled with rGO after having activated by para -aminobenzoic acid. PVP grafting and reduction of GO happened simultaneously in the third step. It is found that the electromagnetic absorption (EA) performance of synthesized ternary composites with suitable PVP amount had been significantly enhanced comparing to Fe 3 O 4 and Fe 3 O 4 /rGO. Merely 15 wt% low loading in paraffin and thin as 2.8 mm can reach effective EA bandwidth (below −10 Db) of 11.2 GHz, and the highest reflection loss reached −67 dB at 10.7 GHz. It was demonstrated that these composites show an effective route to novel microwave absorbing material design.