I'm torn on Goodenough's (and his other main author, Maria Helena Braga) academic contributions lately. They are doing a lot of investigation into glass electrolytes, something that is very important and potentially the future of li-ion. Sodium-ion batteries are also intriguing, although at this point it's questionable they'd be cheaper.

Solid state batteries may eventually be much smaller (heavier, but more energy per kg as well) and hopefully cheaper. Volume is one of the main drivers of the cost of batteries, simply because it's proportional to the amount of material processing. Increasing the specific energy (watt-hours per kg) of a chemistry typically means you can cheaply tweak a material input and your production line is suddenly far more productive.

Nobody has a great pitch on how we'll actually make solid state batteries at scale, but if we figure it out it'll probably also mean we can stop using so many solvents. Currently both the anode and cathode are made from a very carefully curated mix of very tiny spherical grains. Great pains are taken to produce a properly sized mix of sizes as close to spherical as possible- spheres make the chemical reaction as uniform as possible, and the size of the grain determines the ratio of charge (volume) to the rate charge can flow (surface area). It's critically important to tune those to match your performance profile and minimize stress on the battery.

The solvents come in to the picture when you need to spread these materials onto copper/aluminum sheets without letting it compress too much, so it mixes with the electrolyte and doesn't crush the grains. You mix the material in with volatile liquids, spread it ever so carefully to keep it even, and then bake it under heat to drive off the solvent, which is recaptured. That solvent is one of the greatest current health risks and pollution sources during the production of batteries. Some is lost and just being around the stuff is not great for you. Obviously you'll have a better recovery at LG than in some random Chinese factory, but the pollution and risk to health is a loss for the whole of humanity.

ANYWAY: Goodenough's/Braga's research output! It's... very sketchy. They've published a number of papers that make extraordinary claims, some of which implicitly break the conservation of energy. There's a real lack of rigor, and a lot of questionable choices. They often present information that obscures the real performance of their work- like showing a battery under maximum discharge (without giving cycle life) and maximum cycle life (without giving discharge). Matt Lacey did a really excellent review[1] of two 2017 and 2018 papers.

I haven't read his latest papers and I have to get to work unfortunately. If you want to read them, Maria Helena Braga is excellent about sharing her work freely, and puts everything up [2]. It's a real credit to her and despite my criticisms she is a great scientist because of it. I really, genuinely hope to be excited by his research without seeing claims about ever-increasing capacity, or batteries that plate lithium on the anode. I really hope he gets a Nobel and I think that LCO (his original creation) absolutely deserves one. May update this once I check out his latest. Meanwhile, here's a twitter album of making a pouch battery! [3]

[1]: http://lacey.se/2018/07/05/glass-battery-part-2/

[2]: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Maria_Braga4

[3]: https://twitter.com/realscientists/status/106450287687207731...