Ordered Heterostructured Aerogel with Broadband Electromagnetic Wave Absorption Based on Mesoscopic Magnetic Superposition Enhancement

Abstract

Demand for lightweight and efficient electromagnetic wave (EW) absorbers continues to increase with technological advances in highly integrated electronics and military applications. Although MXene-based EW absorbers have been extensively developed, more efficient electromagnetic coupling and thinner thickness are still essential. Recently, ordered heterogeneous materials have emerged as a novel design concept to address the bottleneck faced by current material development. Herein, an ordered heterostructured engineering to assemble Ti3CNTx MXenes/Aramid nanofibers/FeCo@SiO2 nanobundles (FS) aerogel (AMFS-O) is proposed, where the commonly disordered magnetic composition is transformed to ordered FS arrays that provide more powerful magnetic loss capacity. Experiments and simulations reveal that the anisotropy magnetic networks enhance the response to the magnetic field vector of EW, which effectively improves the impedance matching and makes the reflection loss (RL) peaks shift to lower frequencies, leading to the thinner matching thickness. Furthermore, the temperature stability and excellent compressibility of AMFS-O expand functionalized applications. The synthesized AMFS-O achieves full-wave absorption in X and Ku-band (8.2–18.0 GHz) at 3.0 mm with a RLmin of −41 dB and a low density of 0.008 g cm−3. These results suggest that ordered heterostructured engineering is an effective strategy for designing high-performance multifunctional EW absorbers.