Strong mechanics and broadened microwave absorption of graphene-based sandwich structures and surface-patterned structures

Since practical microwave absorption materials and structures are highly pursued in broad industry, traditional hybrid materials generally suffer from poor mechanical strength and narrow effective microwave absorption bandwidth. In this work, we utilized a graphene-based fabric as the effective microwave absorption layer, followed by sandwiching into glass fiber and carbon fiber cloths, to fabricate practical composite structures. For further extending the effective absorption bandwidth, surface-patterned structures were employed to promote the microwave absorption performance in X and Ku bands. The fabricated sandwich structure and SA exhibit > 90% absorption in 9.8–18 and 8–18 GHz, respectively. With the presence of epoxy matrices, both the mechanical strength polymeric sandwich and surface-patterned structures hold high efficiency in broadband absorption. For understanding the effects of the material and structure effect on the performance, various surface conditions were tuned to tailor the performance, and the corresponding mechanism was discussed.