Electroless deposition of silver on aminated graphene oxide coated cotton fabric to develop high-performance electromagnetic interference shielding

Abstract Endowing conductive textiles for electromagnetic interference (EMI) shielding with dominant absorption mechanism is highly demanding. In this study, we propose a facile method of silver electroless plating on aminated graphene oxide (NH2-GO) and reduced graphene oxide (rGO) based cotton fabric for remarkable EMI shielding performance. The successful formation of silver-plated fabrics was confirmed by scanning electron microscopy (SEM), Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) and X-ray diffraction (XRD). EMI shielding performance and surface resistance were studied by vector network analyzer (VNA) and four-probe digital multimeter respectively. Antibacterial activity and hydrophobicity of modified fabrics were also evaluated. Our results showed that all fabrics have good antibacterial activity, and the highest antibacterial activity was shown by silver/rGO fabric about 99.99%. Silver-plated aminated GO-based fabric exhibits low surface resistance and its EMI shielding effectiveness (EMI SE) reaches 49 dB at 7 GHz with 1.2 mm thickness as amination of GO provides more functional groups for silver electroless plating. Moreover, these modified fabrics have higher SEA rather than SER that verifying the absorption characteristic of material. Thus, the remarkable EMI shielding performance of silver-plated NH2-GO fabrics tends to make significant progress in eliminating electromagnetic radiations pollution from our environment.