Facile synthesis, magnetic and microwave absorption properties of Fe3O4/polypyrrole core/shell nanocomposite

Fe₃O₄/polypyrrole (PPy) core/shell nanocomposite, with Fe₃O₄ nanoparticle as core and PPy as shell, could be facilely synthesized via in situ chemical oxidative polymerization of pyrrole monomers on the surface of Fe₃O₄ nanoparticles. The results indicate that core/shell nanocomposite consists of Fe₃O₄ core with the mean diameter of 100 nm and adjacent PPy shell with a thickness of about 70 nm. The as-prepared Fe₃O₄/PPy core/shell nanocomposite exhibits a saturated magnetization of 20.1 emu/g and coercivity value of 368.3 Oe, respectively. The electromagnetic characteristics of Fe₃O₄/PPy core/shell nanocomposite were also investigated with a vector network analyzer in the 2-18 GHz range. The absorbing peak position moves to lower frequency with increasing the thicknesses of samples. The value of the minimum reflection loss is −22.4 dB at 12.9 GHz for Fe₃O₄/PPy core/shell nanocomposite with a thickness of 2.3 mm, and a broad peak with a bandwidth lower than −10 dB is about 5 GHz. Such strong absorption is attributed to better electromagnetic matching due to the existence of PPy and the special core/shell structure.