Compositional and structural design of thermoplastic polyurethane/carbon based single and multi-layer composite sheets for high-performance X-band microwave absorbing applications

In this study, morphological features, dielectric properties, and microwave absorbing performances of thermoplastic polyurethane composite sheets prepared with solution mixing method by using different amounts and types of carbon fillers, carbon black (CB), graphite (G), carbon nanofiber (CNF), and multiwalled carbon nanotube (MWCNT) were investigated, in detail. Microstructural properties and microwave absorbing characteristics of composites were analyzed with scanning electron microscope and vector network analyzer by transmission line method, respectively. Reflection loss (RL) analyses of composites showed that CNF and CNT were more efficient than CB and G for improving the electromagnetic wave absorbing performances of sheets at low filler contents. It was found that the broadest effective absorption area (EAA) (10.03-12.96 GHz) was obtained with the sample having 3 phr of CNF. However, single layer TPU/carbon composite sheets were not effective "RADAR stealth" materials because their RL values were higher than -10 dB at X-band. Thus, multilayer (two, three, and four-layer) composite structures were designed to obtain higher microwave absorption performance within this frequency range via genetic algorithm approach. Multilayer design and modeling works showed that a four-layer composite with a total thickness of 4.8mm yielded excellent microwave absorbing performance and broad EAA, 6.98-13.415 GHz, at X-band.