Three-dimensional polyaniline/cerium oxide composite aerogel with enhanced microwave absorption properties

In order to develop microwave absorbing materials with strong absorption capacity, wide bandwidth and light weight, three-dimensional (3D) PANI/CeO2 composite aerogel was prepared by in-situ synthesis method in this work. The CeO2 nanorods are observed to be interlinked with PANI aerogel to form a porous nanofiber structure. The PANI/CeO2 composite aerogel exhibits excellent absorption performance with an absorption peak of − 53.68 dB under a moderate thickness of 2.5 mm, and the effective absorption bandwidth (EAB) achieves 4.44 GHz. The excellent microwave absorption performance of PANI/CeO2 composite aerogel was ascribed to the interfacial polarization relaxation and space charge polarization by virtue of the 3D conductive network. Furthermore, the oxygen vacancy defects arising from the CeO2 nanostructure also contribute greatly to the microwave absorption.