# Coupled Optoelectronic Simulation and Optimization of Thin-Film Photovoltaic Solar Cells

## TL;DR

This paper presents a comprehensive simulation and optimization framework for thin-film photovoltaic solar cells, integrating optical and electrical modeling to enhance efficiency through advanced computational techniques.

## Contribution

It introduces a coupled optoelectronic simulation tool that combines rigorous optical modeling with charge transport analysis, optimizing layer parameters for improved solar cell performance.

## Key findings

- Optimized layer dimensions and bandgaps increase efficiency.
- Hybridizable discontinuous Galerkin method accurately models charge transport.
- Differential evolution effectively finds optimal design parameters.

## Abstract

A design tool was formulated for optimizing the efficiency of inorganic, thin-film, photovoltaic solar cells. The solar cell can have multiple semiconductor layers in addition to antireflection coatings, passivation layers, and buffer layers. The solar cell is backed by a metallic grating which is periodic along a fixed direction. The rigorous coupled-wave approach is used to calculate the electron-hole-pair generation rate. The hybridizable discontinuous Galerkin method is used to solve the drift-diffusion equations that govern charge-carrier transport in the semiconductor layers. The chief output is the solar-cell efficiency which is maximized using the differential evolution algorithm to determine the optimal dimensions and bandgaps of the semiconductor layers.