Spark Plasma Sintering of LiFePO4: AC Field Suppressing Lithium Migration
, Emanuele Quattrocchi 3, Huaijiu Deng 1, Jian Dong 1, Francesco Ciucci 3,4, Filippo Boi 2, Chunfeng Hu 1 and Salvatore Grasso 1,*Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
"The paper presented a novel technique to determine the Li ion migration. The paper is written professionally and the authors provided enough characterizations to support their claims. The language of the manuscript is professional and does not need any further polish. Considering all these aspects, I suggest ACCEPT.
Reviewer 2 Report
The authors present an interesting piece of research regarding the use of a DC field with SPS. A significant change in the Li ion migration was observed, which may have a significant change on power storage.
The introduction provides an excellent background to the reader and the methodology and results are well detailed. Overall, I would highly recommend this article to be published in 'Materials' with no further changes necessary (beyond a few spelling mistakes here and there).
I highly recommend
Reviewer 3 Report
The work presented regarding the effect of the DC/AC power in the migration of the Lithium during the SPS of LiFePO4 is interesting and well explained in all the different parts.
There is a small comment only regarding the grain size: the authors have any preliminary explanation that might also be based only on the literature that could explain the differences in the samples?
Besides this minor point, my overall recommendation is to accept the paper in the present form.
Reviewer 4 Report
The manuscript of Grasso and coauthors deals with the processing of LiFePO4, one of the most studied and exploited cathode for Li-ion battery, by SPS tools varying the current input, i.e. direct or alternating. The as-processed materials have been then characterized by several techniques to evaluate successful of the synthesis and their electrochemical properties. Very interesting, for the first time, AC mode seems to avoid Li-ion migration and improving the bulk mechanical and electrochemical properties of the LiFePO4 with respect to those prepared by the most conventional DC mode.
The article is well written and organized. The results quite originals and the whole manuscript deserves to be published in Materials journal in the present form.
