Morphological, electromagnetic and absorbing properties of pani/epoxy resin samples

This work deals with the study of radar absorbing materials (RAM) based on conductive samples obtained with polyaniline (PAni) (5-20 wt%) inserted in epoxy resin matrix. SEM analyses show that the PAni presents granular morphology, with an average diameter of 5 µm, with structures evenly distributed. DRX and FT-IR analyses show that the PAni polymer was successfully obtained in its conductive form. Electrical permittivity and magnetic permeability measurements of PAni/epoxy samples were performed in the frequency range of 8.2 to 12.4 GHz (X-band). Microwave attenuation values showed that the PAni-20wt%/epoxy resin sample presented a maximum attenuation of -24 dB, i.e. ~99.6% attenuation of the incident radiation. It was also observed that the amount of attenuated energy varies according to the incident frequency and the specimen thickness.