Lightweight hollow carbon nanospheres with tunable sizes towards enhancement in microwave absorption

Hollow carbon nanospheres (HCNs) with tunable sizes have been successfully prepared by the calcination of hollow copolymer nanospheres. Our findings indicate that compared to the counterpart solid carbon particle, HCNs all achieve substantially enhanced microwave absorption, suggesting that hollow structure plays an important role during microwave absorption. Moreover, further investigation on the effect of different HCNs sizes upon microwave absorption has been conducted. It is found that HCNs with an outer diameter of ∼70 nm and inner diameter of ∼30 nm exhibit the champion EM absorption performance, a minimum reflection loss (RL) of −50.8 dB at 13.5 GHz with a thickness of 1.9 mm, along with the corresponding bandwidth of RL less than −10 dB (90% absorption) covering 4.8 GHz. Notably, such excellent microwave absorption performance, probably as a result of well-matched impedance together with multiple reflection induced by the distinctive hollow structure, demonstrates HCNs to be one of the most competitive carbon-based absorbers to date. More importantly, this study provides an effective strategy to tune the microwave performance via tailoring the sizes of HCNs.