Absorbing and Shielding Properties of a Hybrid Patterned Composite Containing CIPs and Carbon Fiber

In order to broaden the absorption band and maintain a high absorption coefficient, a structural absorber was designed based on rubber-added carbonyl iron particles (CIPs) and polylactic acid added carbon fiber (PLA-CF). The hybrid-patterned composite was fabricated using three-dimensional printing and a conventional compression molding method. The electromagnetic parameters of the CIPs and PLA-CF were tested with a vector network analyzer. The effective permittivity and permeability of the layer element were derived as the two parameters were set in commercial software. Then the parameters of the elements with different CIP content were calculated based on the Maxwell–Garnett mixing rule and the interpolate method. Finally, the reflection loss (RL) and shielding effectiveness (SE) were optimized using a genetic algorithm. The results indicate that structural composites with 1.82 mm thickness exhibit excellent absorption (minimum RL − 15.18 dB) in the 8–14 GHz range band, while the SE was larger than 10 dB and RL less than − 10 dB when the thickness was 7.92 mm.