Covulcanizing of Fluorinated Carbon Black Ability with Styrene Butadiene Rubber Combining Enhanced Low- and Wide-Frequency Microwave Absorption

• Published in: Industrial & engineering chemistry research 2023-11, Vol.62 (43), p.17711-17720
• Main Authors: Lv, Junwei, Wang, Chun, Yang, Jialin, Liu, Miaoxuan, Liu, Boya, Liu, Xiangyang, Liu, Yang
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Materials and Interfaces
• ISSN: 0888-5885; 1520-5045
• DOI: 10.1021/acs.iecr.3c01944

A high-performance soft microwave absorption composite with excellent mechanical strength is needed at advanced equipment manufacturing. In this article, fluorinated carbon black (FCB) was demonstrated to generate active radicals at high temperature via in situ electron paramagnetic spectroscopy (in situ EPR), which could spontaneously vulcanize styrene butadiene rubber (SBR) as confirmed by differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) and Mooney viscosity. An SBR composite containing a single FCB filler without any other additives exhibited good mechanics as the tensile strength reached 10.15 MPa. Utilizing the excellent interfacial properties of FCB, it was found that an FCB-enhanced SBR composite with all necessary additives could further obtain a higher tensile strength of 14.76 MPa, which was increased by 43.02% compared with pristine carbon black-filled composite. Due to the improved impedance matching and richer loss mechanism, the FCB-enhanced SBR composite also exhibited better microwave absorption properties as the effective bandwidth (reflection loss ← 10 dB) could reach 6.43 GHz at maximum since multipeak absorption contains S, X, and Ku bands, which is much better than the signal and narrow absorption of pristine carbon black-enhanced composites. Herein, it was suggested that utilizing direct fluorination to simultaneously couple mechanic and electromagnetic fields would be an effective strategy to fabricate excellent structural-functional composites.