Near-perfect spectrally-selective metasurface solar absorber based on tungsten octagonal prism array

Solar selective absorbers influence the photothermal efficiency of high-temperature solar thermal applications directly and significantly. In present work, a metasurface absorber consisting of an octagonal prism array is proposed, optimized and analyzed. Firstly, the structure parameters of the absorber are optimized, finding the optimal absorber achieves near-perfect spectrally-selectivity compared with the perfect solar absorber. The high solar absorptivity of 0.9591, low emissivity of 0.1594–0.3694, and high photothermal efficiency of 94.72–83.10% are achieved at 1073–1573 K and 1000 suns. Then, the mechanisms leading to the excellent spectral selectivity are investigated, suggesting that the coupling effects of multi-plasmon resonance modes and the impedance matching lead to the high solar absorptivity. Meanwhile, the impedance mismatching is the mechanism to minimize the emissivity in the mid-IR region. Moreover, whether the spectral absorptivity can be changed by structural parameters is investigated, suggesting that the excircle diameter of the first tungsten octagonal prism and the height of SiO(2) under the octagonal prism can influence the spectral absorptivity obviously. Finally, the metasurface absorber is demonstrated to be highly insensitive to both polarization and incident angles. These results suggest that the proposed metasurface absorber should be suitable for high-temperature solar thermal devices.