Optical Simulation and Analysis of GaAs Nanocone, Inverted Nanocone, and Hourglass Shaped Nanoarray Solar Cells

TL;DR

This study uses FDTD simulations to compare the optical properties of GaAs nanocone, inverted nanocone, and hourglass-shaped solar cells, revealing optimal angles and packing densities for enhanced light absorption and photogeneration.

Contribution

It provides a detailed optical analysis of novel nanostructure geometries and their impact on solar cell performance, highlighting optimal angles and packing configurations.

Findings

Nanocone structures outperform others at ~7° sidewall angle.

Hourglass and inverted nanocones show better absorption at larger sun angles.

Sparse packing improves photogeneration uniformity and carrier extraction.

Abstract

In this paper, we have investigated the optical properties of GaAs nanocone (NC), inverted nanocone (INC), and hourglass (HG) shaped solar cells by performing Finite Difference Time Domain (FDTD) simulations. The different structures are compared for their light absorptance, reflectance, transmittance, and photogeneration with traditional cylindrical nanowires. The variation of the different optical properties with the sidewall angle is observed for all the structures. It is seen that the best performance of NC, INC, and HG is obtained at a sidewall nanocone angle of ~ 7{\deg}, ~ 4{\deg}, and at a sidewall bottom nanocone angle of ~ 9{\deg} respectively, with the NC having the best overall performance followed by INC, except for very large angles where the performance of HG is better than INC. The optical properties of these structures were also observed for different sun angles; the HG and INC structures show improvement in absorption for slightly larger sun angles attributed to their better light trapping properties. Finally, a period study is done to observe the effect of dense and sparse cell packing on optical properties and photogeneration profiles of the nanostructures and it is observed that the sparsely spaced nanowires has a better and more evenly distributed photogeneration profile, which will greatly improve the carrier extraction of the radial junction solar cells.