Refractory material inspired ultra-wideband solar absorber for thermoelectric photovoltaic performance enhancement with ML inspired prediction

Abstract

A U-shaped Metal-Insulator-Metal (MIM) solar energy absorber is simulated, and designed in this paper. Tungsten is utilized as the base metal layer because of its transmission blocking characteristics, the SiO2 is used as a dielectric insulator and a U-shaped resonator made of titanium as a radiation absorber to achieve a near perfect Solar energy absorber as it provides the impedance matching abilities. The proposed structure is simulated over the solar spectrum which covers the wavelengths from 0.2 to 2.5 µm which includes the ultraviolet (UV) to near infrared (NIR) bands, the absorbed energy is of 94.52%, 97.06%, and 96.67%, respectively. Furthermore, the additional investigation under solar radiation is conducted and the proposed structure is absorbing most of the energy while the minimal amount is missed in visible range. The main contribution of this work lies in its broadband absorption spectrum which is achieved employing a very simple and easy to fabricate structure. In addition, the structure also achieves the angle and polarization insensitiveness. The major contribution is the prediction of absorption at an intermediate wavelengths with locally weighted linear regression with a R2 score of 0.9999. The proposed structure can be used for the efficiency enhancement of thermoelectric photovoltaic devices.

Keywords

• Solar Energy
• Refractory Materials
• Solar Absorber
• Locally Weighted Linear Regression
• Parameter Optimization