Facile construction of three-dimensional porous netlike reduced graphene oxide/zinc oxide composite aerogels as the lightweight, flame retardant, compression resilience and high-performance electromagnetic wave absorbers

In this work, reduced graphene oxide/zinc oxide (RGO/ZnO) composite aerogels were constructed through a one-pot hydrothermal route. Results manifested that the composite aerogels had the extremely low density and a unique three-dimensional porous network structure, and lots of ZnO particles were almost homogeneously loaded on the rippled surfaces of lamellar RGO. Moreover, the micromorphology and electromagnetic absorbing properties of composite aerogels were facilely regulated by changing the additive amounts of sodium citrate. Notably, the optimal minimum reflection loss reached −79.1 dB at a matching thickness of 2.49 mm and maximum effective absorption bandwidth achieved 7.7 GHz under a thickness of 1.97 mm and filling ratio of 20.0 wt%. Furthermore, the attained composite aerogels presented excellent flame retardant and compression resilience properties. Additionally, the possible electromagnetic dissipation mechanism was proposed. This work provided a reference for the design and preparation of RGO-based dielectric composites as the multifunctional electromagnetic wave absorbers.