LAUSR

To meet the demand of electromagnetic absorption, cheap and easily available microwave absorbents are urgently required. As an important functional material, carbon fibers (CFs) have been widely reported, however, too high conductivity easily leads to the impedance mismatch, which is not favorable to the microwave absorbing performance (MAP). To address this challenge, in this study, novel TiO2/Fe3O4/CF composites with tunable magnetic were synthesized by hydrothermal method and characterized by SEM, XRD, XPS and VSM. As absorbents, the minimum reflection loss (RL) value is − 41.52 dB at a thickness of 2.1 mm, and the corresponding bandwidth with effective attenuation (RL < − 10 dB) is up to 5.65 GHz (4.54–10.19 GHz). More importantly, the plausible mechanisms for the enhanced MAP are explored.