Expedited quasi-updated gradient based optimization techniques for energy conversion nano-materials

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Abstract

Photovoltaic energy conversion has been highly entangled with nano-technology in the past two decades due to the advent of thin film PV technology. Advanced methods of fabrication and material processing have made the design space of PV thin film technology extremely vast. It is now possible to design and fabricate complex nano-scale multi-layer surfaces with textures, gratings, and other types of surface roughness using arbitrary materials (to some extent) and compounds in large scale at a reasonable cost. This freedom of exploration has invoked computational and mathematical techniques such as optimization techniques to help facilitate design problems. However, in comparison to the efforts dedicated to investigating different structure types in nano-scale thin film design, much less has been devoted to developing optimization techniques that are fine-tuned for these classes of complexities. More specifically, inverse design problems dealing with complex partial differential equations such as those of nano-texture designs have two dimensions of complexity: time complexity which is due to expensive forward simulations and, the search space complexity which is due to the complications in the underlying physical system. An efficient optimization technique should be aware of the trade-off between these two, and make use of that optimally. The authors of this paper propose a variation of the first order optimization technique that serves this purpose and expedites inverse optimization of nano-scale designs by a significant factor. The method is based on a modification of quasi-newton search technique that uses a lower dimensional set of sample points at every iteration to estimate an approximation of the gradient vector. A lower dimensional sample size means a significantly lower number of forward simulations and thus a significant saving in the overall design time.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)140-146
Number of pages7
JournalJournal of Nanoelectronics and Optoelectronics
Volume10
Issue number1
DOIs
StatePublished - 1 Apr 2015

Keywords

  • Nano-scales surface textures
  • Numerical optimization
  • Thin film solar cells

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