Synthesis of conducting ferromagnetic nanocomposite with improved microwave absorption properties

The present paper reports the synthesis of polyaromatic amine–ferromagnetic composite with nanosize TiO2 (∼70–90 nm) and γ-Fe2O3 (∼10–15 nm) particles via in situ emulsion polymerization. Magnetic and conductivity studies demonstrate that the conducting ferromagnetic composite possesses saturation magnetization (MS) value of 26.9 emu g−1 and conductivity of the order of 0.46 S cm−1, which are measured by vibrating sample magnetometer and four-probe technique, respectively. It is observed that the presence of the nanosized γ-Fe2O3 in the polyaniline–TiO2 matrix affects the electromagnetic shielding property of the composite. Polyaniline–TiO2–γ-Fe2O3 nanocomposite has shown better shielding effectiveness due to absorption (SEA ∼ 45 dB) than the polyaniline-γ-Fe2O3 (SEA ∼ 8.8 dB) and polyaniline–TiO2 (SEA ∼ 22.4 dB) nanocomposite. The polymer composites were further characterized by high resolution transmission electron microscopy (HRTEM) and X-ray diffraction (XRD) technique.