Near-ideal solar absorber with ultra-broadband from UV to MIR

Abstract

Solar energy is an important path to solving today's energy and environmental crisis as a clean and renewable energy source. Near-ideal solar absorber provides potential technical support for achieving this path as an efficient solar energy harvesting device. In this paper, we present a near-ideal ultra-broadband solar absorber based on metal nanowires, an intermediate dielectric layer, and a metallic substrate layer (MIM structure). Numerical simulation results show that the proposed absorber can achieve more than 90 % absorption in the broadband range of 350–2965 nm, with an average absorption of 95.26 %. The absorption performance of the absorber is correlated with the geometrical parameters of the structure. Meanwhile, the absorber exhibits polarization-independent, incident angle insensitivity, high-temperature thermal stability, and robustness to materials, especially the material's robustness increases the degree of freedom of absorber design and fabrication, and these properties give it a great advantage in practical solar energy capture and harvesting.

Keywords

• Near-ideal solar absorber
• Nanowires array
• High-efficiency
• Robustness
• Stability