Surface Buckling-Enabled Fabrication of Metallic Nanomeshes for Lightweight EMI Shielding.

Abstract

Lightweight metallic nanomeshes are promising for electromagnetic interference (EMI) shielding, but scalable, low-cost fabrication routes that yield tunable porosity and optical transparency remain limited. Here, we introduce a polymer surface buckling assisted exfoliation strategy to produce ultrathin 2D metallic meshes of Ni, Ti, and Al with controllable porosity. This approach enables large-area, low-cost fabrication without complex lithography, etching or harsh chemicals, offering a significant advance over conventional preparation routes. The resulting porous metallic networks exhibit absorption-dominated EMI shielding, achieving up to 28 dB shielding effectiveness in the X-band for Ni meshes, with high gains in shielding efficiency per nm. At the highest porosities studied, the metallic meshes show transmittance between 60% and 80% at 400 nm, underscoring their potential for transparent shielding applications. Temperature-dependent electrical measurements on Al and Ni meshes show resistance minima at low temperature, consistent with intergranular/interflake Coulomb interaction effects. Our results demonstrate a scalable fabrication strategy and clarify the structure-property relationships governing charge transport, optical transmittance, and EMI attenuation in metallic nanomeshes.