Natural iron embedded hierarchically porous carbon with thin–thickness and high-efficiency microwave absorption properties

The traditional strategy for fabricating transition metal/carbon composite microwave absorbing materials (MAMs) is to combine different metallic salts and carbon precursors via various techniques, in which raw material waste and environmental pollution are inevitable. In this work, without addition of any metallic salts, natural iron embedded hierarchically porous carbon (HPC) composites are synthesized for the first time via facile pyrolysis and subsequent “reductive activation” with KOH. Using KOH to react with carbon to generate H(2) can not only generate abundant nanoscale structures in the composites, but also in situ reduce the natural iron present in the bio-precursor to Fe nanoparticles, which facilitates the interfacial polarization and conductive loss of samples considerably. In turn, the modulation of graphitization degree could be realized by simply adjusting the ingredient ratio. Due to the synergistic effect between porosity and graphitization degree, the impedance matching of composites can be well regulated. The reflection loss of HPC-1 achieves −53.6 dB and the effective absorption bandwidth can cover the whole X and Ku bands with a thickness of only 1.4–2.4 mm. This study may pave a way to research on using bio-precursors rich in iron to synthesize high-efficiency and thin–thickness microwave absorbers and promote the diversified development of bio-derived materials in a gentle and facile way.