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John Goodenough's Colleagues Are Skeptical of His New Battery Technology (qz.com)
Earlier this month, a research team led by John Goodenough announced that they had created a new fast charging solid-state battery that can operate in extreme temperatures and store five to ten times as much energy as current standard lithium-ion batteries. The announcement was big enough to have Google's Eric Schmidt tweeting about it. However, there are some skeptics, including other leading battery researchers. "For his invention to work as described, they say, it would probably have to abandon the laws of thermodynamics, which say perpetual motion is not possible," reports Quartz. "The law has been a fundamental of batteries for more than a century and a half." Quartz reports: Goodenough's long career has defined the modern battery industry. Researchers assume that his measurements are exact. But no one outside of Goodenough's own group appears to understand his new concept. The battery community is loath to openly challenge the paper, but some come close. "If anyone but Goodenough published this, I would be, well, it's hard to find a polite word," Daniel Steingart, a professor at Princeton, told Quartz. Goodenough did not respond to emails. But in a statement released by the University of Texas, where he holds an engineering chair, he said, "We believe our discovery solves many of the problems that are inherent in today's batteries. Cost, safety, energy density, rates of charge and discharge and cycle life are critical for battery-driven cars to be more widely adopted." In addition, Helena Braga, the paper's lead author, in an exchange of emails, insisted that the team's claims are valid. For almost four decades, Goodenough has dominated the world of advanced batteries. If anyone could finally make the breakthrough that allows for cheap, stored electricity in cars and on the grid, it would figure to be him. Goodenough invented the heart of the battery that is all but certainly powering the device on which you are reading this. It's the lithium-cobalt-oxide cathode, invented in 1980 and introduced for sale by Sony in 1991. Again and again, Goodenough's lab has emerged with dramatic discoveries confirming his genius. It's what is not stated in the paper that has some of the battery community stumped. How is Goodenough's new invention storing any energy at all? The known rules of physics state that, to derive energy, differing material must produce differing eletro-chemical reactions in the two opposing electrodes. That difference produces voltage, allowing energy to be stored. But Goodenough's battery has pure metallic lithium or sodium on both sides. Therefore, the voltage should be zero, with no energy produced, battery researchers told Quartz. Goodenough reports energy densities multiple times that of current lithium-ion batteries. Where does the energy come from, if not the electrode reactions? That goes unexplained in the paper.
... created a new fast charging solid-state battery that can operate in extreme temperatures and store five to ten times as much energy as current standard lithium-ion batteries.
The first thing that comes to mind is extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.
I would be more worried about the folks who aren"t skeptical. Hopefully the cold fusion debacle (and others, that is just the most prominent in my mind) has taught us something about the value of scientifically reproducing phenomena. In particular, the community should be diligent regarding those phenomena that seem to defy the known laws of physics or go beyond the known boundaries. Those are most likely to a) be incorrect, subject to some sort of falsification, etc.; or, b) represent a revolutionary change in some area of science.
... John Goodenough is going senile and his lab crew are too scared to say anything.
Reminds me of the stories about world renowned heart surgeons who were still operating with shaky hands at 84 because no-one had the balls to stand up to them.
Goodenough & Helena Braga surely know they were going to be painted bright orange as frauds without additional proof.
They surely know they had to follow up with a public display of a cell under charge, then discharge cycles with component weights and measurements to confirm the claims.
Anything else would be a lifelong purgatory in an engineering gulag of con artists.
Those "laws of physics" were created by humans. They're merely mathematical representations of our understanding of the Universe. If we got one tiny yet-unknown detail wrong, it may invalidate or at least modify some of those laws.
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Science does not work by "sale". Science works by other labs reproducing or being unable to reproduce his findings. Right now we're not to that point; this is new.
I'm still trying to parse the paper (ignore the stuff about no dendrites forming on the anode, there's nothing unusual about the physics of that aspect, they're just using the solid electrolyte to suppress that). The interesting part is what's going on at the cathode. As the critics have noted, this is neither intercalation nor reaction; metal is plating out on the cathode side. So the critics' argument seems to be, you have plated metal on one side, plated metal on the other side, where did the energy come from? If you were just to move the metal back from the cathode side to the anode side, you could do it again and get more energy.
However, the argument is also clearly not that simple because you can't just assume that you can move the metal for free. If I were to take the plates of a parallel plate capacitor and pull them apart, the capacitor would be storing more energy, but only because I did work on it. For the "thermodynamics argument" against this battery to hold, they need to be able to show that no work is needed to remove the lithium from the cathode and bring it back to the anode. The paper appears to be making the argument that the charge storage is a capacitive phenomenon; if so, that would invalidate the argument.
But I'm not well enough versed in the topic to be able to assess better the quality of the arguments at hand. Capacitance in general gets weird when you're dealing with tiny structures because of the quantization of charge (there was some work a while back to build a super-powerful "quantum capacitor" based on this).
Aeris Died For Your Sins.