Flakes-assembled porous ZnO/Ni hybrid nanotubes for efficient electromagnetic absorption

Electromagnetic (EM) wave absorption materials with excellent absorption performances are highly de-sirable because of military applications and EM radiation pollution protection. In this work, we have syn-thesized and demonstrated the flakes-assembled porous ZnO/Ni hybrid nanotubes by combining electrospinning and hydrothermal reaction, coupled with following calcination and reduction process. The rational-designed ZnO/Ni nanocomposites exhibited extremely superb EM wave absorption property with a minimum reflection loss (RL) of & minus;71.2 dB at 15.3 GHz, corresponding to a thickness of 3.4 mm and the maximum effective absorption bandwidth (RL <=-10 dB) is up to 9.4 GHz (8.6-18.0 GHz) with the thickness of 4.2 mm. The significant performance improvement originated from that the unique three-dimensional architecture optimized impedance matching characteristics and magnetic-dielectric synergetic effect contributed to a strong attenuation capacity. This work provided a feasible strategy to synthesize flakes-assembled nanotube microstructure and the ZnO/Ni composites promised great potential in the EM wave absorption fields. (c) 2021 Published by Elsevier B.V.