A Novel Machine-Learning Aided Optimization Technique for Material Design: Application in Thin Film Solar Cells
Patterned thin film structures can offer spectrally selective radiative properties that benefit many engineering applications including photovoltaic energy conversion at extremely efficient scales. Inverse design of such structures can be expressed as an interesting optimization problem with a specific regime of complexity; namely moderate number of optimization parameters but highly time-consuming forward problem. For problems like this, a search technique that can somehow learn and parameterize the multi-dimensional behavior of the objective function based on past search points can be extremely useful in guiding the global search algorithm and expediting the solution for such complexity regimes. Based on this idea, we have developed a novel search algorithm for optimizing absorption coefficient of visible light in a multi-layered silicon-based nano-scale thin film solar cell. The proposed optimization algorithm uses a machine-learning predictive tool called regression-tree in an intermediary step to learn (i.e. regress) the objective function based on a previous generation of random search points. The fitted model is then used as a guide to resample from a new generation of candidate solutions with a significantly higher average gain. This process can be repeated multiple times and better solutions are obtained with high likelihood at each stage. Through numerical experiments we demonstrate how in only one resampling stage, the propose technique dominates the state-of-the-art global search algorithms such as gradient based techniques or MCMC methods in the considered nano-design problem.