Issue 24, 2023

Ultra-broadband near-perfect metamaterial absorber for photovoltaic applications

Abstract

An ingenious double-grating metamaterial-based ultrathin-broadband absorber consisting of AlGaAs–Ge–GaAs on a titanium film operating in the visible to infrared wavelength was designed in this work. This structure is capable of overcoming the Shockley–Queisser (SQ) limit and the tunneling junction effect of tandem solar cells. Our comprehensive study revealed the structure's absorption mechanism using the finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) technique, which exhibited excellent short-circuit current density and high absorption. Our proposed ultrathin structure of 410 nm thickness provided a high average absorption of 82.2% and 99.7% under unpolarized and TM-polarized light for a wavelength range of 450–2000 nm, respectively. Additionally, we observed high incidence angle tolerability under the plane wave and thermal stability over time for our proposed grating structure. The performance analysis of our proposed structure as an absorber layer of a solar cell revealed its high power conversion efficiency (PCE) of 31.7% with an excellent short-circuit current density of 47.1 mA cm−2 for AM 1.5 G solar irradiance. The double-grating metamaterial absorber structure has enormous potential for diverse applications such as solar harvesting, thermoelectric generation, and photodetection.

Graphical abstract: Ultra-broadband near-perfect metamaterial absorber for photovoltaic applications

Supplementary files

Article information

Article type
Paper
Submitted
27 Jul 2023
Accepted
15 Oct 2023
First published
16 Oct 2023
This article is Open Access
Creative Commons BY-NC license

Nanoscale Adv., 2023,5, 6858-6869

Ultra-broadband near-perfect metamaterial absorber for photovoltaic applications

P. P. Nakti, D. Sarker, M. I. Tahmid and A. Zubair, Nanoscale Adv., 2023, 5, 6858 DOI: 10.1039/D3NA00565H

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported Licence. You can use material from this article in other publications, without requesting further permission from the RSC, provided that the correct acknowledgement is given and it is not used for commercial purposes.

To request permission to reproduce material from this article in a commercial publication, please go to the Copyright Clearance Center request page.

If you are an author contributing to an RSC publication, you do not need to request permission provided correct acknowledgement is given.

If you are the author of this article, you do not need to request permission to reproduce figures and diagrams provided correct acknowledgement is given. If you want to reproduce the whole article in a third-party commercial publication (excluding your thesis/dissertation for which permission is not required) please go to the Copyright Clearance Center request page.

Read more about how to correctly acknowledge RSC content.

Social activity

Spotlight

Advertisements