Zinc oxide-tungsten-based pyramids in construction of ultra-broadband metamaterial absorber for solar energy harvesting

Abstract

A new broadband absorber is investigated for the entire frequency domain of solar light (infrared, visible light and ultraviolet). While current absorbers in the literature have limited operation frequencies, investigated structure has a wide bandwidth and a perfect absorptivity (99% at nearly all operation frequencies). The proposed metamaterial absorber has ultra-broadband, angle-insensitive, polarisation-independent characteristics with a different conventional pyramid shape. Whereas other pyramid or truncate pyramid-shaped multi-layered metamaterial absorber (MA) are composed of multi-layered dielectrics and metal combinations, the proposed structure has only three layers. As a result of exhibiting perfect absorption characteristic, the proposed structure is a new candidate for energy harvesting applications in solar energy collection.