Template-sacrificing synthesis of hollow Co@C nanorods for excellent microwave absorption

Metal organic frameworks (MOFs) have been widely used as microwave absorption (MA) materials owing to their varied structures and large specific surface area. However, it is still challenging to endow MOF derivatives with a rational structure to achieve outstanding microwave absorption. In this work, the hollow Co@C nanorods (HCCN) with lots of winding carbon nanotubes on the surface are obtained based on a template-sacrificing method which employs ZnO nanorods as templates and ZIF67 nanoparticles as ornaments. The HCCNs possess large pore size and specific surface area, efficiently improving the impedance matching . The 1D structure, abundant heterointerfaces and defects trigger strong conduction loss, interfacial and dipole polarization, respectively. Therefore, HCCNs exhibits excellent MA properties: the strong reflection loss of −66.8 dB at the thickness of 2.1 mm and the effective absorption bandwidth of 5.68 GHz at 2.5 mm. Radar cross section (RCS) simulation results have confirmed the practicality of HCCNs. This study proposes an inspiration for the structural designing of MOF materials and derivatives to realize amazing MA performance.