Single-walled carbon nanotube based metamaterial absorber for solar cell application

Carbon nanotubes possess superior mechanical and electrical properties such as being lightweight, strong, and flexible; and having high electrical conductivity. Solar cells containing single-walled carbon nanotubes that absorb photons near infrared region have been a focal area of research and development due to their promising characteristics of harvesting light in the long wavelength region, cost effectiveness and performance. Absorption properties of SWNTs are not yet well studied quantitatively, even though their importance is very significant for the new solar technologies. In this thesis, various SWNT based metamaterial absorbers with almost 99% absorption capability have been designed and numerically simulated for the solar cell application. The compact structure and maximum absorption of MTM absorber can provide highly efficient and cost effective solar cell. Novel wide-band, triple-band, and multi-band polarization-insensitive metamaterial absorber structure with semiconducting SWNT as the dielectric layer is proposed to efficiently absorb the incident electromagnetic radiations in a wide-range frequency region. Computed results are verified analytically by interface theory and also with the previously reported MTM absorbers available in the literature as well as with different solver techniques such as FEM and FIT. Keywords: Single-walled carbon nanotube, metamaterial absorber, wide-band, triple-band, multiband, solar cell