Green Electromagnetic Interference Shielding Material Based on Thermally Expandable Microspheres

With the aggravation of electromagnetic pollution, electromagnetic interference (EMI) shielding materials have received enormous attention. However, most of the current EMI shielding materials only focus on the shielding effectiveness (SE), neglecting the electromagnetic pollution brought by secondary reflection. In this work, a method of preparing absorption-dominated EMI shielding materials, which are also called green EMI materials, using thermally expandable microspheres (TEMs) and expanded graphite (EG), is proposed. The expansion of TEMs in the EG/waterborne polyurethane mixture can improve the impedance matching between the composite and air. When the content of TEMs is 5 wt % and the content of EG is 15 wt %, the EMI SE of the sample reaches 38.4 dB, and the average reflection power coefficient of this composite is 0.27, indicating that the material mainly shields electromagnetic waves through absorption. Meanwhile, the prepared material also exhibits good stability, maintaining outstanding EMI SE and low value of reflection power coefficient even after the compression–recovery test.