Design of artificial nacre-like hybrid films as shielding to mitigate electromagnetic pollution

Multifunctional designs of biomimetic layered materials are in great demand for broadening their applications. Artificial hybrid films are fabricated using a simple evaporation-induced assembly method, using nacre as the structural model, two-dimensional reduced graphene oxide (RGO) and magnetic graphene (MG) as inorganic building blocks and poly(vinyl alcohol) (PVA) as glue. The nacre-like films exhibit good mechanical performance, such as high stiffness, strength and toughness. The biomimetic materials possess the shielding properties of electromagnetic pollution. MG based nacre-like films present more significant electromagnetic interference (EMI) shielding performance than RGO film, because of a synergism between dielectric loss of graphene and magnetic loss of magnetic nanoparticles. Average EMI shielding effectiveness (SE) reaches ∼20.3 dB over the frequency range of 8.2-12.4 GHz (X band) for MG hybrid film only 0.36 mm thick. The lightweight, flexible and thin MG artificial hybrid films possess good potential for EMI shielding applications. © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.