Millimeter wave absorbing property of flexible graphene/acrylonitrile-butadiene rubber composite in 5G frequency band

ABSTRACTThe coming fifth generation mobile communication technology (5G) puts forward enormous requirements on millimeter wave (MMW) absorbing materials above 24 GHz. In the present work, elastic absorbing composites were fabricated with reduced graphene oxide (RGO) of different reduction time and nitrile rubber (NBR). A series of characterization methods were used to study the reduction degree and the structure of composites, the electromagnetic parameters of composites in 26.5–40 GHz were also measured and used to conduct an analytical computation of reflection loss (RL). It was found that, 3h-RGO/NBR presented the minimum RL of −45 dB at 35.4 GHz while 7h-RGO/NBR exhibited the widest effective bandwidth (<-10 dB) about 6.5 GHz. In addition, the mechanical properties of composites were also improved by RGO. Therefore, the obtained RGO/NBR composites displayed promising prospect as elastic MMW absorbing materials for 5G applications.