Fabrication of weaving structure copper tube for electromagnetic interference shielding material: effect of annealing temperature on its electromagnetic shielding performance

To design and fabricate a novel and low-cost electromagnetic interference shielding material with outstanding performance is becoming extremely popular by scientists over the years, owing to increasingly complex proliferation of electromagnetic waves. In this work, the composite construction that included activation of silver nitrate, electroless copper plating (ECP) and annealing for fabricating weaving structure copper tube was reported to alleviate the problem above. The effect of annealing temperature on its electromagnetic shielding performance was investigated as well. Results manifest the metal particle/ligand structure on weaving cotton surface could promote copper particles to be reduced and deposited on its surface, which can generate weaving copper pipes with face-centered cubic structure spontaneously. The resultant composite, i.e. textured copper tube possessed brilliant shielding effectiveness of 25.2 dB. Interestingly, the electromagnetic shielding performance of annealed ECP cotton was firstly enhanced, and then reduced with the increase of annealing temperature. The 200 degrees C-annealed ECP cotton exhibited a better shielding effectiveness performance, the values are increased by 38.1% to 34.8 dB, in which the reflection and absorption shielding are increased by 39.9% and 6.7% compared to the one of unannealed sample, corresponding power coefficients of reflection, transmission and absorption were 0.2691, 0.0031, 0.7277, owning to the improvement of Cu tube crystallinity and the introduction of Cu2O particles acted as scattering center of electromagnetic waves. Therefore, it would provide a promising future tendency from the viewpoint of abundant resources and sustainable development.