Electromagnetic and microwave absorption characteristics of PMMA composites filled with a nanoporous resorcinol formaldehyde based carbon aerogel

Nanostructured carbons have opened up new perspectives in fields of electromagnetic (EM) applications. The present study aims at the processing of microwave absorbing (MA) materials based on carbon aerogels (CAs) in polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA) matrix to be used in X-band frequency. CAs were synthesized by carbonization of a sol–gel derived organic gel from resorcinol and formaldehyde as starting materials. Microwave attenuation properties of the prepared composites were investigated in terms of CAs particle size distribution (PSD) and mass fraction. To do so, the optimal PSD was initially determined by assessing the EM attenuation performance of the CAs/PMMA composites with constant mass loading (10 wt%) and differing particle sizes. Next, the EM properties of the selected CAs with the optimal particle size was measured as a function of mass fraction varying from 1 to 15 wt% in order to obtain a highly efficient CAs based MA. The results indicate that the dielectric loss of CAs composites can be enhanced by optimizing the PSD as well as the mass fraction of CAs. The effective absorption bandwidth of composites containing 10 wt% of CAs exceeded 3.7 GHz at a very thin thickness of 1.9 mm indicating that these materials present advantages as microwave absorbers.