الفهرس 
Nanostructured Energy Harvesters for Green Electric Power Generation
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Abstract
Conventional energy sources such as natural gas, oil, coal, or nuclear are
limited and highly depleted. Today, energy based on „green‟ resources has
attracted considerable interest and investment worldwide, as a viable alternative to
the use of polluting fossil fuels. Solar energy is the most abundant source of such
„green‟ renewable energy, coming in its two forms: light and heat. The
photovoltaic (PV) solar cell (SC) is one of the predominant solar energy harvesting
devices to convert light directly to electricity. Currently, bulk crystalline silicon
(C-Si) photovoltaic modules have ” " ~ " ”90 % of the global PV market. Silicon (Si) is
one of the largest broadband light absorbing materials, where the power
conversion efficiency (PCE) of a planar C-Si SC reaches 22 %. However, C-Si SC
suffers from high cost. The second generation SC technology, based on low-purity
thin-film (TF) materials, has emerged to reduce the high cost of the traditional CSi SC and yet, the conversion efficiency is only ” " ~ " ”12 %, due to the small optical
path length. The third generation of solar cell technology has improved the light
absorption in TF-SC using light trapping techniques. This approach increases the
optical path length and promotes the generation of e-h carriers, which elevates the
efficiency of TF SCs. Consequently, an efficient TF SC can be designed using less
active material with reduced cost. Nanowires (NW) are highly promising
nanostructures that have unique optical and electrical characteristics compared to
TF SCs. Such NWs have a number of merits, such as reduction in reflection,
improvement in trapping, and consumption of less material