A new flexible and ultralight carbon foam/Ti3C2TX MXene hybrid for high-performance electromagnetic wave absorption

Abstract

A new ultralight carbon foam/Ti₃C₂T_X (CF/MXene) electromagnetic (EM) absorbing hybrid with three-dimensional network structure was fabricated by vacuum impregnation and freeze-drying process. These hybrids display excellent flexibility and steady compression-resilience properties and also the special three-dimensional structure with ultralow density of only 5–7 mg cm⁻³ shows higher EM absorption than most foam-based EM absorbers. Studies have shown that the minimum reflection loss of CF/MXene-N2 reaches −45 dB at 8.8 GHz with the Ti₃C₂T_X nanosheets content of 9.8%. In the meanwhile, the effective absorption bandwidth of CF/MXene-N2 can also reach up to 5 GHz (from 6.9 GHz to 11.9 GHz) with the thickness of 4.5 mm. Moreover, the fundamental EM absorption mechanism of CF/MXene hybrids involved to impedance matching, conductive loss and polarization loss is carefully analyzed. Thus, it is expected that the new ultralight carbon foam/Ti₃C₂T_X hybrids with three-dimensional network structure will have great application prospects in the fields of EM absorption.