Tungsten based metasurface absorber for visible regime

TL;DR

This paper presents a tungsten-based broadband metasurface absorber designed for the visible spectrum, achieving over 98% average absorbance and optimized for high-temperature solar energy applications.

Contribution

It introduces a novel two-dimensional tungsten metasurface design that is polarization insensitive and achieves near-perfect broadband absorption in the visible range.

Findings

Achieved an average absorbance of over 98% with optimized designs.

Maximum average absorbance of 99.3% in one of the solutions.

Design is effective under high temperatures due to tungsten's high melting point.

Abstract

Utilizing solar energy requires perfect absorption by photovoltaic cells for efficient conversion of solar energy into useful electrical energy. Metasurfaces can, not only be used to absorb solar energy efficiently but, they do so with thickness of structure in nano-scale -effectively reducing the size of the device. To achieve aforementioned feature metasurface absorbers are developed which give better absorbance on narrow/wide frequency spectrum. These absorbers are fashioned with variable structures employing variable materials but still, perfect absorbance is not attained with a simple two-dimensional (not varying in z-direction) structure. This paper presents a simulated realization of a broadband metasurface absorber based on tungsten nano-structure. The design is two-dimensional, polarization insensitive, broadband and is predicted to give better response under high temperatures ascribed to high melting point of tungsten i.e. 3422{\deg}C. Cross alignment is found optimum for tungsten as it is impedance matched with the free space for visible spectrum. This cross arrangement is further tweaked by changing span, width and height of the cross resulting in 7 different optimized solutions giving an average absorbance greater than 98%. One, amongst these solutions, gave a maximum average absorbance of 99.3%.