Prism-shaped hollow carbon decorated with polyaniline for microwave absorption

Abstract In this work, a novel hierarchically oriented polyaniline (PANI) decorated on prism–shaped hollow carbon (HCP@PANI) were synthesized via carbonization and in–situ polymerization methods, coupled with sacrificing the template of hierarchically oriented MnO2 and ZnO tetrapods processes, respectively. Morphologies, structures, and microwave absorption properties of hierarchically oriented HCP@PANI nanocomposites have been systematically investigated. The results indicated that hierarchically oriented HCP@PANI nanocomposites has excellent microwave absorption properties. The minimum reflection loss (RLmin) reaches –64.0 dB at the frequency of 11.1 GHz with effective absorption frequency bandwidth of 5.0 GHz (9.5–14.5 GHz). The mechanism of the highly effective microwave absorption performance was attributed to superior dielectric loss abilities, good impedance matching and well-defined geometric structures. It is expected that hierarchically oriented HCP@PANI nanocomposites fabricated in this work could provide a new method for designing novel microwave absorbers.