Loss Simulation Analysis and Experimental Verification of Porous Fe₃O₄ Electromagnetic

Abstract

This paper focuses on the effect of the porosity of Fe3O4 on electromagnetic wave (EMW) loss. The pore structures were based on the Voronoi method by MATLAB, and the electromagnetic fields were constructed based on COMSOL Multiphysics. The energy loss of EMWs with frequencies of 2–18 GHz through Fe3O4 nanoparticles with different porosities was simulated and analyzed. Well-defined porous Fe3O4 nanostructures were synthesized by heating FeCl3·6H2O, urea, and surfactant (TBAB) in an ethylene glycol solution. Then, the prepared samples were eroded with oxalic acid to obtain different porosities. The electromagnetic parameters of the experimental samples were tested to validate the simulation results. The results showed that increasing the porosity, to some extent, was beneficial to the impedance matching characteristics, thus improving the EMW loss. The simulation results with different porosities and the experimental results with varying pore volumes had some consistency. When the porosity of the digital model was 30.63% and the pore volume of the experimental samples was 0.3102 cm3/g, |Z in/Z 0| was the closest to 1, indicating that the impedance matching was the best. At the same time, it was found that the pore volume of the material can be used to characterize the porosity during the experimental preparation, thus simplifying the data processing.