Compositional and Hollow Engineering of Silicon Carbide/Carbon Microspheres as High-Performance Microwave Absorbing Materials with Good Environmental Tolerance

Lixue Gai; Yahui Wang; Pan Wan; Shuping Yu; Yongzheng Chen; Xijiang Han; Ping Xu; Yunchen Du

doi:10.1007/s40820-024-01369-6

Compositional and Hollow Engineering of Silicon Carbide/Carbon Microspheres as High-Performance Microwave Absorbing Materials with Good Environmental Tolerance

Nanomicro Lett. 2024 Apr 2;16(1):167. doi: 10.1007/s40820-024-01369-6.

Authors

Lixue Gai¹, Yahui Wang², Pan Wan¹, Shuping Yu¹, Yongzheng Chen¹, Xijiang Han¹, Ping Xu¹, Yunchen Du³

Affiliations

¹ MIIT Key Laboratory of Critical Materials Technology for New Energy Conversion and Storage, School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin, 150001, People's Republic of China.
² Anhui Provincial Laboratory of Advanced Laser Technology, College of Electronic Engineering, National University of Defense Technology, Hefei, 230037, People's Republic of China. wangyahui22@nudt.edu.cn.
³ MIIT Key Laboratory of Critical Materials Technology for New Energy Conversion and Storage, School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin, 150001, People's Republic of China. yunchendu@hit.edu.cn.

Abstract

Microwave absorbing materials (MAMs) characterized by high absorption efficiency and good environmental tolerance are highly desirable in practical applications. Both silicon carbide and carbon are considered as stable MAMs under some rigorous conditions, while their composites still fail to produce satisfactory microwave absorption performance regardless of the improvements as compared with the individuals. Herein, we have successfully implemented compositional and structural engineering to fabricate hollow SiC/C microspheres with controllable composition. The simultaneous modulation on dielectric properties and impedance matching can be easily achieved as the change in the composition of these composites. The formation of hollow structure not only favors lightweight feature, but also generates considerable contribution to microwave attenuation capacity. With the synergistic effect of composition and structure, the optimized SiC/C composite exhibits excellent performance, whose the strongest reflection loss intensity and broadest effective absorption reach - 60.8 dB and 5.1 GHz, respectively, and its microwave absorption properties are actually superior to those of most SiC/C composites in previous studies. In addition, the stability tests of microwave absorption capacity after exposure to harsh conditions and Radar Cross Section simulation data demonstrate that hollow SiC/C microspheres from compositional and structural optimization have a bright prospect in practical applications.

Keywords: Compositional engineering; Environmental tolerance; Hollow engineering; Microwave absorption; SiC/C composites.