Efficient solar absorber based on VO2-W-SiO2 hybrid metamaterials

The broad spectrum near unity solar absorber shows important significance in the solar energy conversion. In this work, a polarization independent broadband and wide-angle metamaterials solar absorber consisted of VO2 periodic arrays and alternately stacked SiO2/W layers is designed. To explore the absorption of solar radiation and proper geometric parameters, numerical studies are carried out on the proposed structure. And the absorption of the designed structure is above 90% in the spectra range of 300-2000 nm with an average absorption of 95%. Moreover, the proposed structure possesses excellent solar absorptivity and insensitivity to the incident angle and polarization of sunlight. The average integrated absorption remains 90% with the light incident angle of 50°. Hence, the proposed broadband solar absorber has potentially valuable applications in thermophotovoltaic conversion, thermal emitters, solar cell, and so on.