Abstract
Flat, thin-film solar cells cannot completely absorb the incoming sunlight within the double passage afforded by the back metallic mirror. Although significant interferometric improvement arises if an optimal set of thickness is chosen within the cell [1], additional light-harvesting design remains necessary to obtain an acceptable power conversion efficiency. To randomly structure the surface of the solar cell is an interesting theoretical possibility [2], but appears impractical for very thin cells. Instead, to cover the cell by a nearly randomizing structure [3] or by micro-lenses [4] is in principle easier to implement. In this work, we analyse a configuration proposed in [5], which consists of an array of silica fibres that are fused together, with their axes perpendicular to the ecliptic, see Fig. 1. Initial investigation was performed for fibre diameters ranging from 1 to 4 µm. Full-wave numerical simulations suggested that particular inclinations lead to the excitation of damped whispering gallery modes, giving rise to improved short circuit current at oblique incidence [5].
© 2015 IEEE
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