Prism-shaped hollow carbon decorated with polyaniline for microwave absorption

In this work, a novel hierarchically oriented polyaniline (PANI) decorated on prism-shaped hollow carbon (HCP@PANI) were synthesized via carbonization and in-situ polymerization methods, coupled with sacrificing the template of hierarchically oriented MnO2 and ZnO tetrapods processes, respectively. Morphologies, structures, and microwave absorption properties of hierarchically oriented HCP@PANI nanocomposites have been systematically investigated. The results indicated that hierarchically oriented HCP@PANI nanocomposites has excellent microwave absorption properties. The minimum reflection loss (RLmin) reaches - 64.0 dB at the frequency of 11.1 GHz with effective absorption frequency bandwidth of 5.0 GHz (9.5-14.5 GHz). The mechanism of the highly effective microwave absorption performance was attributed to superior dielectric loss abilities, good impedance matching and well-defined geometric structures. It is expected that hierarchically oriented HCP@PANI nanocomposites fabricated in this work could provide a new method for designing novel microwave absorbers.