<story><title>Drones will fly for days with new photovoltaic engine</title><url>https://techxplore.com/news/2019-07-drones-days-photovoltaic.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dwighttk</author><text>&amp;quot;For the past 15 years, the efficiency of converting heat into electricity with thermovoltaics has been stalled at 23 percent. But a groundbreaking physical insight has allowed researchers to raise this efficiency to 29 percent. Using a novel design, the researchers are now aiming to reach 50 percent efficiency in the near future by applying well-established scientific concepts.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;^interesting part, the drone stuff is just click-bait</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bufferoverflow</author><text>We have multijunction cells with 47.1% efficiency (as of June 20th).&lt;p&gt;Other than the price, what&amp;#x27;s the significance of single-junction 50% efficiency?&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;File:CellPVeff(rev190702).pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;File:CellPVeff(rev190702).pdf&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>Drones will fly for days with new photovoltaic engine</title><url>https://techxplore.com/news/2019-07-drones-days-photovoltaic.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dwighttk</author><text>&amp;quot;For the past 15 years, the efficiency of converting heat into electricity with thermovoltaics has been stalled at 23 percent. But a groundbreaking physical insight has allowed researchers to raise this efficiency to 29 percent. Using a novel design, the researchers are now aiming to reach 50 percent efficiency in the near future by applying well-established scientific concepts.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;^interesting part, the drone stuff is just click-bait</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>flanbiscuit</author><text>left out the actual science part of this interesting part:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; According to Yablonovitch, this finding builds on work that he and students published in 2011, which found that the key to boosting solar cell efficiency was not by absorbing more photons (light) but emitting them. By adding a highly reflective mirror on the back of a photovoltaic cell, they broke efficiency records at the time and have continued to do so with subsequent research.</text></comment>