Controllable Fabricating Dielectric–Dielectric SiC@C Core–Shell Nanowires for High-Performance Electromagnetic Wave Attenuation

Heterostructured dielectric–dielectric nanowires of SiC core and carbon shell (SiC@C) with high-performance electromagnetic wave absorption were synthesized by combining an interfacial in situ polymer encapsulation and carbonization process. This approach overcomes the shortcomings of previous reported methods to prepare carbon shell that both carbon shell and free carbon particles are formed simultaneously. In our developed approach, the core of SiC nanowires are first positively charged. Then the negative resorcinol-formaldehyde polymers as the carbon source are anchored on SiC nanowires under the attraction of electrostatic force, which well suppresses the nucleation of free carbon particles. The thickness of the carbon shell could be modulated from 4 to 20 nm by simply adjusting the moral ratio of resorcinol to SiC nanowires. The resulting SiC@C core–shell nanostructures without free carbon particles offer synergism among the SiC nanowires and the carbon shells, generating multiple dipolar polarization, surfaced polarization, and associated relaxations, which endow SiC@C hybrid nanowires with a minimum reflection loss (RL) value of −50 dB at the frequency of 12 GHz and an effective absorption bandwidth of 8 GHz with RL value under −10 dB at the optimized state. Our results demonstrate that SiC@C hybrid nanowires are promising candidates for electromagnetic wave absorption applications.