Nano-Structured Gratings for Improved Light Absorption Efficiency in Solar Cells

Farzaneh Fadakar Masouleh, Narottam Das and Seyed Mohammad Rozati
Additional contact information
Farzaneh Fadakar Masouleh: Science Faculty, Department of Physics, University of Guilan, Rasht 41938-33697, Iran
Narottam Das: School of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering, University of Southern Queensland, Toowoomba, QLD 4350, Australia
Seyed Mohammad Rozati: Science Faculty, Department of Physics, University of Guilan, Rasht 41938-33697, Iran

Energies, 2016, vol. 9, issue 9, 1-14

Abstract: Due to the rising power demand and substantial interest in acquiring green energy from sunlight, there has been rapid development in the science and technology of photovoltaics (PV) in the last few decades. Furthermore, the synergy of the fields of metrology and fabrication has paved the way to acquire improved light collecting ability for solar cells. Based on recent studies, the performance of solar cell can improve due to the application of subwavelength nano-structures which results in smaller reflection losses and better light manipulation and/or trapping at subwavelength scale. In this paper, we propose a numerical optimization technique to analyze the reflection losses on an optimized GaAs-based solar cell which is covered with nano-structured features from the same material. Using the finite difference time domain (FDTD) method, we have designed, modelled, and analyzed the performance of three different arrangements of periodic nano-structures with different pitches and heights. The simulated results confirmed that different geometries of nano-structures behave uniquely towards the impinging light.

Keywords: solar cell; photovoltaic cell; FDTD modelling; subwavelength nano-structures; reflection loss (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q Q0 Q4 Q40 Q41 Q42 Q43 Q47 Q48 Q49 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/9/9/756/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/9/9/756/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jeners:v:9:y:2016:i:9:p:756-:d:78411

Access Statistics for this article

Energies is currently edited by Ms. Agatha Cao

More articles in Energies from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().