Click here for Logical Analysis ReportOp-ed:
From our analysis, we found the following most relevant:Goodenough's high reputation was enough to deter the strongest criticism however, with Daniel Steingart of Princeton University commenting, "If anyone but Goodenough published this, I would be, well, it's hard to find a polite word." A formal comment was published by Steingart and Venkat Viswanathan from Carnegie Mellon University in Energy & Environmental Science.
Goodenough responded to the skepticism, stating: "The answer is that if the lithium plated on the cathode current collector is thin enough for its reaction with the current collector to have its Fermi energy lowered to that of the current collector, the Fermi energy of the lithium anode is higher than that of the thin lithium plated on the cathode current collector." Goodenough went on to say in a later interview with Slashdot that the lithium plated on the cathode is on the "order of a micron thick".
Goodenough's response has drawn further skepticism from Daniel Steingart and also Matthew Lacey of Uppsala University, who point out that this underpotential deposition effect is only known for extremely thin layers (monolayers) of materialsThis operating mechanism is radically different from the insertion (intercalation) mechanism of most conventional Li-ion battery materials.
In 2018, a new version was described by most of the same authors in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, in which the cathode is coated with a special plasticiser solution to avoid interface cracking as different materials expand at different rates