A dear-sky spectral solar radiation model for direct and diffuse fluxes, combined with topographic calculations from digital terrain data, computes either incident, net, or reflected solar radiation at any point on a snow surface in mountainous terrain. The radiation may be integrated over any wavelength range from 250 to 5000 nm, or over any time step. Atmospheric attenuation parameters are oz...

To bridge the gap between theoretically predicted and experimentally demonstrated efficiencies of solar thermophotovoltaics (STPVs), we consider the impact of spectral non-idealities on the efficiency and the optimal design of STPVs over a range of PV bandgaps (0.45-0.80 eV) and optical concentrations (1-3,000x). On the emitter side, we show that suppressing or recycling sub-bandgap radiation i...

Spectroscopic ellipsometry and atomic force microscope techniques were employed to analyze optical properties, microstructure and thickness of cobalt oxide thin films deposited on metal substrates by the sol-gel dipping method. The ellipsometric data were conveniently fitted, assuming a stratified structure for the deposited film, which consists of a sublayer native oxide that was coated with a...

A multi-layer, one-dimensional (1-D) solar radiative transfer algorithm that accounts for subgrid-scale cloud variability is presented. This algorithm was implemented in the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR)-Community Climate Model (CCM) broadband column model. A subset of its validation is shown here using a three-dimensional (3-D) inhomogeneous cloud field generated by a cloudre...

The internal quantum effi ciency (IQE) of solid-state dye sensitized solar cells (ssDSCs) is measured using a hybrid optical modeling plus absorptance measurement approach which takes into account the parasitic absorption of the hole transport material (HTM). Across device thicknesses of 1 to 4 microns, ssDSCs sensitized with Z907 and TT1 dyes display relatively constant IQEs of approximately 8...

Graphene, a two-dimensional monatomic layer of carbon material, has demonstrated as good candidate for applications ultrafast photodetectors, transistors, transparent electrodes, and biosensors. Recently, many studies have shown that using metallic deep gratings could enhance the absorptance graphene 2.3% up to 80% in near infrared region photon detection. This paper presents utilizing nanograt...

Vertical III-V nanowires are capable of resonant absorption at specificwavelengths by tuning the nanowire diameter, thereby exceeding the absorption of equivalent thinfilms. These propertiesmay be exploited to fabricatemultispectral infrared (IR) photodetectors, directly integratedwith Si, without the need for spectral filters or vertical stacking of heterostructures as required in thinfilm dev...