Thin-Film Solar Energy Absorber Structure for Window Coatings for Self-Sufficient Futuristic Buildings

Alsaif, Haitham; Muheki, Jonas; Ben Ali, Naim; Ghachem, Kaouther; Surve, Jaymit; Patel, Shobhit K.

doi:10.3390/mi14081628

Cited by 4 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 42 publications

(42 reference statements)

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“…With the large amounts of fossil fuels being consumed, research into diverse energy sources for the future has led to extensive research around the globe, with photovoltaic absorption technology developing extremely fast [1][2][3][4]. Eternal, clean solar energy could be a good substitute for traditional energy sources to solve the growing energy needs of mankind [5,6]. Nowadays, solar energy has been applied in the field of desalination, greenhouse gas reduction, and energy conversion [7][8][9][10] and has a very promising future.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Simulation and Analysis of a Near-Perfect Solar Absorber Based on SiO2-Ti Cascade Optical Cavity

Chen,

Yi,

Song

et al. 2024

Photonics

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The main development direction for current solar technology is to improve absorption efficiency and stability. To bridge this gap, we design in this paper a structure consisting of two multilayer disc stacks of different radii, one topped by a TiO2 disc and the other by a cascade disc stack composed of SiO2-Ti, for use in thermal emitters and solar absorbers. The innovation of our work is the exploitation of multiple Fabry–Perot resonances in SiO2-Ti cascade optical cavities to develop absorber bandwidths while investigating it in the field of thermal emission and many aspects affecting the efficiency of the absorber. The finite difference time domain method (FDTD) results show absorption averages as high as 96.68% with an absorption bandwidth of 2445 nm (A > 90%) at 280 nm–3000 nm solar incidence and even higher weighted averages as high as 98.48% at 1.5 solar air mass (AM) illumination. In order to investigate the physical mechanisms of our designed absorber in a high absorption state, we analyzed the electric field distributions of its four absorption peaks and concluded that its high absorption is mainly caused by the coupling of multiple Fabry–Perot resonance modes in the cascaded optical cavity. While considering this high efficiency, we also investigated the effect of complex environments such as extreme high temperatures and changes in the angle of incidence of the absorber, and the results show that the thermal radiation efficiency of the emitter is 96.79% at an operating temperature of 1700 K, which is higher than its thermal radiation efficiency of 96.38% at an operating temperature of 1500 K, which is a perfect result. On the other hand, we conclude that the designed structure is independent of polarization, while the absorber still has 88.22% absorption at incidence angles of up to 60°, both in transverse electric (TE) and transverse magnetic (TM) modes. The results of this study can help improve the performance of future solar absorbers and expand their application areas.

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