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 Fe 3 O 4 /reduced graphene oxide (rGO) composites with adjustable morphologies and components. The effect of rGO content on the Fe 3 O 4 morphology is investigated and it is found that the morphology of Fe 3 O 4 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 Fe 3 O 4 /rGO composites is remarkably improved due to the synergistic electric and magnetic effect between rGO and Fe 3 O 4 . Specifically, when the amount of GO is 10 wt . %, the as-prepared Fe 3 O 4 /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. Graphic abstract