The recent proposal of the van der Waals crust as the spherical section comprised between the atomic radius and the van der Waals radius of an element generated a commentary by Grochala pointing out some supposed weaknesses of the approach (https://doi.org/10.1039/D3SC90191B). Our inital study is complemented herein by an analysis of the effects of the different size of the two interacting crusts, which shows that the penetration index defined earlier can adequately handle the misfit crust interactions.
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