Permittivity-Regulating Strategy Enabling Superior Electromagnetic Wave Absorption of Lithium Aluminum Silicate/rGO Nanocomposites

Lithium aluminum silicate (LAS) nanoparticles have been successfully loaded on graphene nanosheets by adding a silane coupling agent KH-550 by sol-gel process, hydrothermal reaction, and heat treatment process. By regulating the complex permittivity of reduced graphene oxide (rGO) by LAS nanoparticles and KH-550, LAS/rGO-KH-550 possesses excellent microwave absorption performance. The maximum reflection loss of LAS/rGO-KH-550 reaches -62.25 dB at 16.48 GHz with thickness of only 2.7 mm, and the widest bandwidth is up to 6.64 GHz below -10 dB. The LAS/rGO-KH-550 has effective absorption (99.9%) below -20 dB at all X and Ku bands (8-18 GHz). Also, the added quantity of composites in the paraffin matrix is only 20 wt %. The results demonstrate that the interfacial polarization, the Debye dipolar relaxation, the well-matched characteristic impedance, and the quarter-wavelength matching all play important roles in improving the microwave absorption properties of LAS/rGO-KH-550 nanocomposites. Consequently, the LAS/rGO-KH-550 nanocomposites can be readily applied as an ultra-wide-band, light weight, and ultra-high-performance microwave-absorbing material.