REVIEW Progress on agricultural residue-based microwave absorber: a review and prospects Soumya Sundar Pattanayak 1, * , S. H. Laskar 1 , and Swagatadeb Sahoo 2 1 Electronics and Instrumentation Engineering Department, National Institute of Technology Silchar, Silchar, India 2 Electronics and Communication Engineering Department, National Institute of Technology Jamshedpur, Jamshedpur, India Received: 20 August 2020 Accepted: 9 November 2020 Published online: 19 November 2020 Ó Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020 ABSTRACT Microwave absorber comprising various agricultural residue-based microwave- absorbing materials is one of the interesting and challenging topics to modern- day scientists and engineers. In this work, we explicitly present an overview of the microwave absorption mechanism, different measurement techniques, var- ious types of microwave absorber structure, and factors affecting the microwave absorption. We also discuss various stages of fabrication of lightweight and low- cost microwave absorber using different types of agricultural residues. This review provides an overall summary of the state-of-the-art progress on various agricultural residue-based microwave absorbers. Finally, some new prospects are also discussed from the existed theoretical and experimental results in this work, to propel their application in practice. Introduction Modern expeditious evolution in electronics and communication sectors and increasing use of elec- tronic equipment and digital devices in every nook and cranny of our modern livelihood raise an alarming upsurge in the emission of electromagnetic (EM) radiation creating electromagnetic pollution. It leads to severe deterioration in electronic equipment, biological systems, information technology, and defense safety technologies. It has also a grievous effect on human health causing many diseases. As a result, this new kind of pollution has drawn serious worldwide attention and its subsidence can be achieved by either shielding mechanism or absorp- tion mechanism. Compared to the shielding mecha- nism, the absorption mechanism has been received a great consideration to mitigate the EM pollution due to its effectiveness in dissipating microwave energy without any secondary pollution [1]. In recent times, microwave-absorbing materials (MAMs) are treated as a powerful alternative to eradicate EM interfer- ence. Good-quality MAM must have some general features as follows [2]: • Reduce the reflection of EM waves at the free space from the absorber interface. • Should have strong absorption of EM waves. Handling Editor: Kevin Jones. Address correspondence to E-mail: soumyapattanayakph.d@gmail.com https://doi.org/10.1007/s10853-020-05557-8 J Mater Sci (2021) 56:4097–4119 Review