Innovative Evolutionary Algorithm for the Design and Optimization of Meta-material Absorbers in the Solar Spectrum

Efficiently capturing photons from the solar spec-trum is crucial for effective solar energy harvesting. To enhance photon absorption, there has been a growing interest in meta-material absorbers in recent years. Yet, designing and selecting parameters for these absorbers remains challenging due to their complex multi-physics properties. In this article, a new technique for designing meta-material absorber is studied using an interlink of simulation and optimization algorithm. Comsol Multiphysics software is used to simulate a metal-insulator-metal structure (Ni-SiO
2
-Ni in this case) to calculate average absorbance in solar spectrum of 200 - 2000 nm. A new innovative evolutionary algorithm is proposed to use this average absorbance as objective function for optimizing design parameters of the metamaterials more efficiently and reliably. A database is introduced in the algorithm to minimize the execution time. The proposed algorithm requires negligible simulation time compared to the traditional trial and error method and has improved initial average absorbance from 89.1% to 93.36%. Further analysis reveals that, on average, there is an absorbance of 92.37% in the ultraviolet range, 98.03% in the visible band, and 94.29% in the near-infrared range, with a peak absorption of 99.99% occurring at a wavelength of 650 nm. In addition, the proposed broad-band solar absorber presented in this work, can be used in optimizing the design of meta-materials for other applications with multiple objectives.