Fe nanoparticles and CNTs co-decorated porous carbon/graphene foam composite for excellent electromagnetic interference shielding performance

In order to deal with the increasingly serious situation of electromagnetic interference (EMI), the design and development of efficient EMI shielding materials are highly desirable. This work takes advantages of metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) derived carbonaceous material and graphene foam (GF) to build an interconnected heterostructure for an ultralight and excellent EMI shielding performance material. Evenly dispersed Fe nanoparticles/carbon nanotubes (CNTs) network is in situ produced by carbonizing Fe(acac)3 decorated Zeolitic Imidazolate Framework-8 (ZIF-8). And the composite is prepared by depositing Fe nanoparticles and CNTs co-decorated carbon matrix (FCC) on the surface of GF. This complex material with three-dimension (3D) network introduces electrical loss and magnetic loss and also results in a strong synergistic effect between FCC and GF to obviously improve the EMI shielding performance. The FCC/GF composite with polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) obtains a significantly high total EMI shielding effectiveness (SET) of 48 dB in the X-band (8.2–12.4 GHz). Meanwhile, the density of composite is only 0.138 g/cm3 and thus the specific EMI-SE (SSE) is up to 347.8 dB cm3/g. Therefore, FCC/GF has a wide range of prospects as an ultralight and efficient EMI shielding material.