Metal/nitrogen co-doped hollow carbon nanorods derived from self-assembly organic nanostructure for wide bandwidth electromagnetic wave absorption

Abstract Converting carbonaceous material into heteroatom-doped hollow nanomaterial is a promise route to realize lightweight and high-performance electromagnetic wave absorption (EMA). In this work, a series of metal/nitrogen co-doped hollow carbon nanorods (M-NHCRs, M represent as Fe, Co, Ni) were successfully fabricated via a facile self-assembly template strategy, which refers to self-assembling of 9,10-dibromoanthracene (DBA), surficial modification with polydopamine (PDA) and metal ions, and controlled pyrolysis. Among these M-NHCRs, Co-NHCR exhibits remarkable EMA performance, where the optimal reflection loss (RL) reaches −58.6 dB at a loading ratio of 5 wt%. Moreover, the effective absorption bandwidth (EAB) gets to 7.65 GHz. It is considered that the high-performance EMA should be attributed to the unique hollow structure, excellent conductance loss and improved polarization relaxation. This research not only provides a new idea for the design of lightweight electromagnetic absorbents with broadband efficient absorption, but also broadens the way of synthesizing hollow nanomaterials.