Heterogeneous stacking strategy towards carbon aerogel for thermal management and electromagnetic interference shielding

Faced with the increasing heat dissipation and electromagnetic interference (EMI) shielding problems in electronics, carbon modified polymer-based composites with significant EMI shielding and thermal management performance are of particular interest. Herein, we proposed a carbon heterogeneous stacking strategy to construct the all carbon aerogels for the modification of epoxy resin. A hybrid 3D structure of reduced graphene oxide–carbon nanotube-vertical edge-rich graphene (rGO-CNT-VG) with covalent bonding are achieved all by chemical vapor deposition, in which the pore space of skeleton is creatively modified. Due to the elaborate design and control of microstructures, the obtained hierarchical 3D rGO-CNT-VG skeleton have plenty of seamlessly bonded heterogeneous interfaces between different components, which can create additional charge polarization, interfacial polarization and dielectric relaxation to promote significantly electromagnetic microwave attenuation and conversion and achieve ideal EMI shielding performance. Impressively, the rGO-CNT-VG/epoxy composites possess excellent thermal conductivity of 2.46 W m⁻¹ K⁻¹ and EMI shielding effectiveness of 56.65 dB, which are 5.1 times and 1.9 times higher than those of the rGO/epoxy composites, respectively. More importantly, the strategy of designing all carbon heterogeneous stacking skeleton in this study provides a guidance for synergistic controlling of multifunctional performance of composites.