Metal-nitrilotriacetic acid chelate derived strategy to selectively produce porous Ni/C, CoNi/C and Co/C magnetic heterostructured nanorods for lightweight and strong microwave absorption

Because of tempting magnetic-dielectric synergies and interfacial effects, designing a simple and lowcost route for producing multidimensional carbon-based magnetic nanocomposites is very important for the development of microwave absorbers (MAs). In this paper, a facile and propagable Ni-nitrilotriacetic acid chelate (NAC) derived strategy was proposed to selectively fabricate zero-dimensional (0D)/onedimensional (1D) porous Ni/C magnetic heterostructured nanorods (MHNRs) consisting of 1D carbon nanorod, lots of pores and 0D Ni nanoparticles via a combined hydrothermal and thermally treated methods. The porous Ni/C MHNRs displayed the progressively improved Ni and C crystallinity by controlling the temperature, which resulted in the tunable electromagnetic and microwave absorption properties (MAPs). Additionally, 0D/1D porous CoNi/C and Co/C MHNRs could be selectively produced through this strategy by adopting CoNi-NAC and Co-NAC as precursors. Benefiting from desirable interface and magnetic/dielectric synergies, the acquired 0D/1D porous Ni/C, CoNi/C and Co/C MHNRs presented excellent MAPs and certain corrosion resistance properties. In especial, Co/C MHNRs displayed a strong absorption capacity (-47.89 dB), an ultrawide effective absorption bandwidth (8.40 GHz) and small matching thicknesses (similar to 2 mm), which were a desirable candidate for MAs. Consequently, a facile, low-cost and propagable metal-NAC derived strategy was proposed to synthesize 0D/1D porous carbon-based MHNRs, which presented an alternative technique to develop lightweight efficient MAs. (c) 2025 Published by Elsevier Ltd on behalf of The editorial office of Journal of Materials Science & Technology.