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.

制定了一种设计工具来优化无机薄膜光伏太阳能电池的效率。除了抗反射涂层，钝化层和缓冲层之外，太阳能电池还可以具有多个半导体层。太阳能电池由沿固定方向周期性排列的金属光栅支持。严格的耦合波方法用于计算电子-空穴对的产生率。可杂交的不连续伽勒金方法用于求解控制半导体层中载流子传输的漂移扩散方程。主要输出是太阳能电池效率，该效率通过使用差分进化算法来确定半导体层的最佳尺寸和带隙而最大化。