Hollow
metal materials have drawn a lot of attention owing to their
excellent performance for wide potential applications. Here we have
successfully synthesized hollow Co nanostructure with controllable
structures and compositions, including hollow Co nanospheres, hollow
Co nanochains, and hollow Co@Fe nanospheres. Uniform Fe nanospheres
and nanochains are first synthesized; then, Fe@Co nanospheres are
achieved by electroless plating cobalt on iron surfaces. Hollow Co
nanostructures are obtained easily by galvanic cell reaction between
Co shells and Fe cores in hydrochloric acid at room temperature. Furthermore,
hollow Co@Fe nanospheres form after plating iron on the as-synthesized
hollow Co nanospheres, which acted as templates. Electromagnetic (EM)
wave absorption properties of hollow Co nanostructures are investigated.
Hollow Co nanochains, when blended with 40 wt % in paraffin-based
filler, exhibit better EM wave absorption (−42.5 dB) than the
hollow Co nanospheres (−30.4 dB) with same ratio of filler.
On the contrary, because the filler content is 60 wt %, the reflection
loss of hollow Co nanochains degrades to −14.0 dB, which is
much worse compared with hollow Co nanospheres (−41.7 dB).
Moreover, hollow Co@Fe nanospheres (with 60 wt % filler) show excellent
EM wave absorption properties with minimum RL of −47.3 dB and
effective bandwidth of 4.8 GHz compared with hollow Co nanospheres.
The method of electroless plating followed by galvanic cell reaction
to synthesize hollow nanostructures is simple, robust, and widely
applicable for some metals or composites with various potential.