Electromagnetic and optical characteristics of wrinkled Ni nanostructure coated on carbon microspheres

[Display omitted] •Wrinkled Ni as a novel morphology was tailored through a complementary method.•Wrinkled Ni/grapy CMS composites illustrated the salient microwave features.•PS and PVDF were applied as novel polymeric media.•Investigation of the interfacial interactions on the microwave attenuation.•Evaluation of the magnetic and optical property of the fabricated nanostructures. In this study, a wrinkled Ni nanosheet/grapy carbon microsphere (CMS) nanocomposite was architected based on novel approaches in experimental treatments and applied precursors. Moreover, the effects of the absorbing medium on the microwave absorbing characteristics were investigated. Initially, 2D Ni nanostructures were prepared trough complementary co-precipitation and hydrothermal methods using NaBH4 as a precursor. The grapy CMSs fabricated by the conventional hydrothermal method were ornamented by the wrinkled Ni nanosheets using a complementary ultrasonic and hydrothermal method. X-ray powder diffraction (XRD) patterns confirmed that the pure crystal structures of the samples have been synthesized. Interestingly, the patterns demonstrated that the Ni(OH)2 intermediate plays a key role to achieve the Ni nanostructure. The images of field emission scanning electron microscopy (FE-SEM) and transmission electron microscopy (TEM) displayed that wrinkled Ni nanosheets have uniformly coated grapy CMSs. Moreover, the chemical species, magnetic characteristics, and optical properties of the obtained materials were scrupulously dissected by Fourier transform infrared (FT-IR), vibrating sample magnetometer (VSM), and diffuse reflection spectroscopy (DRS) analyses, respectively. Based on the microwave absorbing properties assessed by a vector network analyzer (VNA), the maximum reflection loss (RL) of CMS/Ni/polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF) nanocomposite was −90.29 at 10.68 GHz, bringing 3.40 GHz (RL