Modeling and simulation of nanorods photovoltaic solar cells: A review

Abstract

In response to the massive focus on the fabrication of nanorods (NRs) and nanowires (NWs) based photovoltaic (PV) solar cells, having analytical models or numerical simulators for them has become a hot topic in the researches over the past few years. The structures of NRs and NWs solar cells can solve the carrier collection problems that face the conventional planar solar cells and can help in trapping light in the cell. Also, the radial geometry improves tuning band gap, relaxating facile strain, and increases defect tolerance. These advantages enable the PV solar cells to achieve high conversion efficiency with a relatively low cost. NRs and NWs solar cells’ modeling and simulation enable the estimation of the cells performance and characteristics such as the efficiency, fill factor, short circuit current and open circuit voltage. This review summarizes different analytical modeling techniques and different numerical simulations of nanorods PV solar cells that were published in the last 11 years. The structure of the PV cell includes p-n concentric cells, p-i-n concentric cells, branched NWs cells, axial horizontally oriented cells, and axially connected p-n junction cells.