Rational Self-Assembly of Fe3O4 Nanostructures on Reduced Graphene Oxide for Enhanced Microwave Absorption

Tailored design and fabrication of microwave absorption materials is of great importance to the development of electromagnetic technology. In the present work, we report a facile solvothermal method to construct Fe3O4/reduced graphene oxide (rGO) composites with adjustable morphologies and components. The effect of rGO content on the Fe3O4 morphology is investigated and it is found that the morphology of Fe3O4 varies from self-assembled solid/flower-like structure to monodisperse nanoparticles with the increase of rGO content. Impressively, the corresponding microwave absorption performance of the Fe3O4/rGO composites is remarkably improved due to the synergistic electric and magnetic effect between rGO and Fe3O4. Specifically, when the amount of GO is 10 wt. %, the as-prepared Fe3O4/rGO composite shows a minimum reflection loss of -64.7 dB at 6.6 GHz with an absorber thickness of 4.5 mm and a broad effective absorption bandwidth of 13.6 GHz with the thickness of 1.5-5 mm. Our result shows that an appropriate amount of rGO can achieve matched impedance matching value resulting in the enhancement of electromagnetic absorption. [GRAPHICS] .

Automated summary

Tailored design and fabrication of microwave absorption materials is crucial for the development of electromagnetic technology. A solvothermal method was used to construct Fe3O4/rGO composites with adjustable morphologies, where increasing rGO content led to improved microwave absorption performance. The synergistic electric and magnetic effect between rGO and Fe3O4 significantly enhanced the absorption properties of the composites.