Design and Fabrication of Layered Electromagnetic Interference Shielding Materials: A Cost-Effective Strategy for Performance Prediction and Efficiency Tuning

The electromagnetic interference (EMI) shielding market is one of the fast-growing sectors owing to the increasingly complicated electromagnetic environment. Recently, priority has been given to improvise the techniques to fine-tune and predict the shielding properties of structures without exhausting raw materials and reduce the expense as well as the time required for optimization. In this article, we demonstrate an effective and precise method to predict the EMI shielding effectiveness (SE) of materials via simulating the performance of composites having alternate layers of conducting and magnetic materials in a virtual waveguide measurement environment based on the finite element method (FEM). The EMI SE of multilayered heterogeneous arrangements (MHAs) is simulated in the K-band region using ANSYS High Frequency Structure Simulator (HFSS) software, which can be extended to all other bands as well. Various simulations carried out by changing the order of the conducting and magnetic layers and the number of layers revealed that the strategic arrangement of electromagnetic (EM) energy-trapping layers inside the impedance-matching layers in the MHAs significantly contributes toward the enhancement of absorption-dominated EMI shielding. Among the MHAs, the conducting-magnetic-conducting (CMC) systems exhibited the highest shielding effectiveness of above 50 dB. The MHAs are realized for testing using poly(vinylidene fluoride)-based composites of low-cost carbon black and barium hexaferrite, an easily accessible ferrite. Through this study, we propose the idea that materials with high production cost and cumbersome fabrication procedures are not necessary to realize highly efficient shielding materials.