Doped, conductive SiO 2 nanoparticles for large microwave absorption

Michael Green; Zhanqiang Liu; Peng Xiang; Yan Liu; Minjie Zhou; Xinyu Tan; Fuqiang Huang; Lei Liu; Xiaobo Chen

doi:10.1038/s41377-018-0088-8

Doped, conductive SiO ₂ nanoparticles for large microwave absorption

Light Sci Appl. 2018 Nov 14:7:87. doi: 10.1038/s41377-018-0088-8. eCollection 2018.

Authors

Michael Green¹, Zhanqiang Liu², Peng Xiang³, Yan Liu^{1

4}, Minjie Zhou^{1

5}, Xinyu Tan³, Fuqiang Huang², Lei Liu⁶, Xiaobo Chen¹

Affiliations

¹ 1Department of Chemistry, University of Missouri, Kansas City, MO 64110 USA.
² 2State Key Laboratory of High Performance Ceramics and Superfine Microstructure, Shanghai Institute of Ceramics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai, 200050 China.
³ 3College of Materials and Chemical Engineering, Hubei Provincial Collaborative Innovation Center for New Energy Microgrid, China Three Gorges University, Yichang, 443002 China.
⁴ 4College of Environment, Sichuan Agricultural University, Chengdu, Sichuan 611130 China.
⁵ 5School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Hunan Institute of Science and Technology, Yueyang, 414000 China.
⁶ 6State Key Laboratory of Luminescence and Applications, Changchun Institute of Optics, Fine Mechanics and Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Changchun, 130033 China.

Abstract

Although many materials have been studied for the purpose of microwave absorption, SiO₂ has never been reported as a good candidate. In this study, we present for the first time that doped, microwave conductive SiO₂ nanoparticles can possess an excellent microwave absorbing performance. A large microwave reflection loss (RL) of -55.09 dB can be obtained. The large microwave absorption originates mainly from electrical relaxation rather than the magnetic relaxation of the incoming microwave field. The electrical relaxation is attributed to a large electrical conductivity that is enabled by the incorporation of heterogeneous (N, C and Cl) atoms. The removal of the magnetic susceptibility only results in a negligible influence of the microwave absorption. In contrast, the removal of the heterogeneous atoms leads to a large decrease in the electrical conductivity and microwave absorption performance. Meanwhile, the microwave absorption characteristics can be largely adjusted with a change of the thickness, which provides large flexibility for various microwave absorption applications.