Structural engineering is definitely a promising and effective approach to develop excellent microwave absorbing materials with quantities of advantages. Especially, when carbon materials act as the constituents, the fabricated absorbers are available to gain more prominent absorption performance. However, extra high conductivities and the widespread aggregations and stacking of low-dimensional carbon materials always detrimentally affect the impedance matching and weaken the attenuation capacity, inevitably confining their further absorption applications. Herein, by introducing the amorphous chiral carbon nanocoils to overcome the challenges and achieve the strategies of structure optimization and multicomponent recombination, the reduced graphene oxide/carbon nanocoil/carbon nanotube aerogels were successfully synthesized by a successive hydrothermal method and freeze-drying strategy. The as-obtained aerogels possess a porous architecture that contribute to the extraordinary impedance matching and multiple reflections, which integrate the multifarious dielectric loss mechanisms of diverse carbon materials simultaneously. Benefiting from the tricomponent synergistic effect, the ultralight aerogels reach an outstanding microwave absorption property with an extremely low filler content of only 6 wt %. This work provides a helpful approach to design hierarchical absorbers consisted by multidimensional carbon materials for fantastic microwave absorption.
Keywords: aerogels; carbon nanocoils; microwave absorption; structural engineering; synergistic effect.