Electromagnetic shielding effectiveness and serviceability of the multilayer structured cuprammonium fabric/polypyrrole/copper (CF/PPy/Cu) composite

• CF/PPy/Cu composites were obtained via a simple and robust synthesis route.
• Formation of CF/PPy/Cu composites was confirmed by various measurements.
• The composites own multiple characteristics of wave-absorption and wave-reflection.
• The obtained composites exhibited an extremely high shielding effectiveness.
• The serviceability of the resultant composites was excellent.

In this paper, we developed a simple and robust synthesis route to fabricate multilayer structured cuprammonium fabric/polypyrrole/copper (CF/PPy/Cu) composite, which could be potentially used as electromagnetic interference (EMI) shield due to its characteristics of both EM wave-absorption and EM wave-reflection. PPy layer was directly deposited onto the bare CF substrate via an in-situ polymerization approach, and the interaction mechanism between PPy and CF substrate was investigated by FT-IR and FT-Raman measurements. The results indicated that the interaction between PPy (NH) and CF (>COH) substrate was by hydrogen bonding. Afterwards, Cu film was constructed on the as-made PPy coated CF (CF/PPy) by an electroless copper plating method. The elemental analysis of the samples in each step was conducted by using XPS measurement. XRD analysis showed that the top Cu film had a characteristic face-centered cubic (FCC) crystalline structure. SEM images illustrated that the thickness of the PPy film was about 1.52 μm with 11.4% deviation, which was enough to generate the inter-fiber connection. Moreover, the probable growth mechanism of top-Cu films was proposed according to their surface morphologies. The shielding effectiveness (SE) values of copper plated CF (CF/Cu) and CF/PPy/Cu were recorded and compared by using a Spectrum analyzer (30–1000 MHz). The resultant CF/PPy/Cu composite had a higher EMI SE (30.3–50.4 dB) with sheet resistance of 85.8 mΩ/sq. The results of ultrasonic washing, TGA and tensile measurements revealed that the proposed conductive fabric exhibited an excellent serviceability, which was adequately reliable for practical application.

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