High-performance microwave absorption enabled by copper–permalloy co-doped hierarchically porous carbon composites
摘要
Rational engineering of both microstructure and composition is essential for the development of lightweight and high-performance microwave absorbers. Herein, copper-permalloy co-doped porous carbon composites are constructed via a sol–gel assisted in situ pyrolysis strategy followed by KOH activation. This approach enables the formation of a hierarchically porous carbon matrix uniformly embedded with Fe–Ni–Cu metallic phases, allowing precise regulation of dielectric-magnetic synergy and impedance matching. As a representative sample, PC@Fe15Ni80Cu5 exhibits outstanding microwave absorption performance. A minimum reflection loss of − 41.27 dB is achieved at 14.6 GHz with a thin matching thickness of 1.7 mm. More importantly, an ultra-wide effective absorption bandwidth of 4.66 GHz is realized at a reduced thickness of only 1.6 mm, covering almost the entire Ku band. The high performance is attributed to the KOH optimized hierarchical porous structure, which improves impedance matching and increases multiple scattering, and to the combined dielectric and magnetic losses introduced by Cu and permalloy co doping. This work demonstrates an effective design paradigm for porous carbon-based microwave absorbers that simultaneously achieve strong attenuation, broad bandwidth, and thin matching thickness.