Preparation and microwave absorption properties of CoFe2O4/NiCo2O4 composite powders

The magnetic spinel cobalt ferrite (CoFe2O4) powders had the high microwave absorption performance at the large thicknesses on account of the low permittivity. Combining the CoFe2O4 powders with other dielectric loss materials had been suggested to improve their impedance matching and microwave absorption performance. In this work, the microwave absorption performance of the CoFe2O4 powders was enhanced by adding the various amounts of the NiCo2O4 nanoparticles as dielectric loss material. The CoFe2O4-x NiCo2O4 composite powders (x = 0, 12.5, 25, and 50 wt %) were prepared by a facile two-pot solution combustion synthesis method. Although the X-ray diffraction peaks of NiCo2O4 phase were absent, but the decrease of saturation magnetization from 61 to 30 emu/g was related to the amount of NiCo2O4 material. Furthermore, the NiCo2O4 nanoparticles were nucleated and grown on the surface of spongy CoFe2O4 powders because the synthesized CoFe2O4 powders were added to the precursor solution of NiCo2O4 material containing the nickel and cobalt nitrates as oxidants and glycine as organic fuel. The microwave absorption performance was analyzed by measuring the permittivity and permeability spectra which were applied for evaluating the reflection loss versus frequency and thickness. The CoFe2O4-25 wt % NiCo2O4 composite powders had the higher microwave absorption performance including the high reflection loss of −40 dB and broad effective bandwidth of 5.6 GHz of Ku band (12–18 GHz) at a small matching thickness of 1.9 mm. The high microwave absorption performance of the x = 25 wt % sample was attributed to its better impedance matching via a proper combination of the permittivity and permeability values.