Nanoporous resorcinol-formaldehyde based carbon aerogel for lightweight and tunable microwave absorption

Porous carbon materials hold great promise for high-performance microwave absorption application. Herein, nanoporous carbon aerogels of different textures were prepared by sol-gel method and pyrolysis. The effects of solution chemistry and carbonization temperature on the microwave absorbing property were discussed. It is found that, the incident electromagnetic energy was attenuated through multiple reflections, conductive loss and polarization loss in the 3D interconnected porous structures. Furthermore, reasonable architecture design and pyrolysis temperature can be employed to achieve favorable microwave absorption capacity of the carbon aerogel that will be a platform for accessing highly controlled structurally light absorbers.