Perfect metamaterial absorber with high fractional bandwidth for solar energy harvesting.

Abstract

A new perfect metamaterial absorber (PMA) with high fractional bandwidth (FBW) is examined and verified for solar energy harvesting. Solar cells based on perfect metamaterial give a chance to increase the efficiency of the system by intensifying the solar electromagnetic wave that incident on the device. The designed structure is mostly offered in the visible frequency range so as to exploit the solar’s energy efficiently. Parametric investigations with regard to the measurements of the design structure are fulfilled to characterize the absorber. The finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) method-based CST simulator was used to keep the pattern parameters and absorbance analysis. The metamaterial shows almost 99.96% and 99.60% perfect absorption at 523.84 THz and 674.12 THz resonance frequencies. Moreover, absorption’s FBW is studied, and 39.22% FBW is found. The results confirm that the designed PMA can attain very high absorption peak at two modes such as transverse electric (TE) and transverse magnetic (TM) mode. Other than the numerical outcomes demonstrated that the suggested configuration was also polarization angle insensitive. In addition, the change of absorbance of the structure has provided a new kind of sensor applications in these frequency ranges. Therefore, the suggested metamaterial absorber offers perfect absorption for visible frequency ranges and can be used for renewable solar energy harvesting applications.