Pore-confined strategy to achieve controllable growth of Co/CoO in carbon nanofibers for the fabrication of lightweight and enhanced microwave absorbers

In recent years, magnetic metal nanoparticles (NPs)/carbon nanofibers (CNFs) composites have become very promising electromagnetic waves (EMWs) absorbers. However, how to achieve controllable growth of magnetic metals in CNFs is still an urgent problem to be solved. Herein, we reported a pore-confined strategy for constructing the porous Co/CoO/CNFs. By introducing different amounts of acetone (0.20 g, 0.30 g and 0.40 g) into the aqueous phase spinning solution to construct the porous structure , we achieved uniform distribution of Co/CoO NPs and ultimately obtained the porous Co/CoO/CNFs microwave absorbers (MAs) with excellent microwave absorption performance. Thanks to the excellent impedance matching and enhanced polarization loss, the porous Co/CoO/CNFs obtained the minimum reflection loss (RL) of −52.2 dB with a thickness of 3.0 mm, and the effective bandwidth (EBW) was 3.02 GHz when the acetone addition in the spinning solution was 0.30 g. Therefore, the pore-confined strategy proposed herein is conducive to the design of the MAs with excellent performance and low infilling rates based on CNFs. Furthermore, the porous structure of CNFs also improves the lightweight performance of the MAs.