Flame Resistance and Bonding Performance of Plywood Fabricated by Guanidine Phosphate-Impregnated Veneers
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
The paper presents the analysis of the influence of the treatment on the fireproof performance and bonding strength of the plywood. The results showed that guanidine phosphate modification could endow the plywood with excellent fire-retardant and smoke suppression effect.
The experiments described in this paper were undertaken in order to highlight flame-retardant and bonding performance of plywood fabricated by GT impregnated veneers.
However, I have some recommendation:
- Line 15 - The term “LOI” must be defined.
- Line 15 – “LOI was up to 37…” It is not clear what it represents 37 (measurement unit?).
- Line 200 - What does it mean “char yield”. It is not clearly.
- Figure 7 - Droplet morphology … time – 0 deg. This period (t = 0 deg) does not exist in the figure. Please improve the figure.
Overall, the paper is well structured and the results are properly defined.
Author Response
Responses to reviewer 1 Comments:
Point 1: Line 15 - The term “LOI” must be defined.
Response: LOI is the abbreviation of “Limiting oxygen index” and the definition was added in the manuscript.
Point 2: Line 15 – “LOI was up to 37…” It is not clear what it represents 37 (measurement unit?).
Response: 37 was refer to the LOI of 10% GP modified wood, and the unit “%” was also added in the manuscript.
Point 3: Line 200 - What does it mean “char yield”. It is not clearly.
Response: The “char yield” was changed to “residual char ”, and it meant the residual char of wood samples modified and unmodified after TG test.
Point 4: Figure 7 - Droplet morphology … time – 0 deg. This period (t = 0 deg) does not exist in the figure. Please improve the figure.
Response: Actually, the droplet morphology and contact angle shown in Figure 7 (a) are the contact angle measured at time = 0, and Figure 7 (b) are the droplet morphology and contact angle measured at time = 60 s. The figure was revised in the manuscript.
Reviewer 2 Report
The aim of the research underlying the paper is to evaluate guanidine phosphate as a fire-retardant for fabrication of fire-resistant plywood. The topic of the paper is clear and of great practical interest and importance. However, the manuscript misses the discussion section which prevents it from being evaluated as a complete scientific publication. The lack of discussion also means that the paper does not meet the requirements set by the journal for research manuscripts, which are explained in the Manuscript preparation section. In addition, a number of questions arose when reviewing the sections included in the manuscript.
Abstract
Line 15: Abbreviation LOI is not specified and its numerical value is missing a unit.
Introduction
Line 38: Not clear - tolerance to what?
Lines 44-45: Not clear “…for decoration and decoration in public places.”
Lines 50-51: Not clear “….and the coatings mainly intumescent coatings or composed with polymers and inorganic salts, oxides, hydroxides or other inorganic compounds”
Lines 65-67: The statements should be supported by references.
Lines 89-90: “…polyhydroxy biomass materials such as paper, cotton, wood, and natural fibers”. To mine knowledge, the listed materials are commonly known as lignocellulosic materials.
Line 111: Does “pre-dried” mean that the veneer was with water content of 0%?
Lines 114-115: Not clear the procedure of resin application onto the veneers – usually the resin is only applied on one side of a veneer-ply in industrial manufacturing.
Lines 122-123: The method of FTIR measurements, namely, KBr pellets, ATR, etc., as well as the pre-processing steps of “raw” spectra (such as baseline correction etc.) should be provided.
Lines 139-140: It should be explained how the leaching was evaluated - what was measured after immersion.
Results
Lines 146-147: It seems that something is confused in the caption of Figure 1.
Lines 162 and 169: The statements in the lines 162 (…no new absorption peaks appear… ) and 169 (…the absorption peak at 1245 cm−1 correspond to the stretching vibration of P=O [15, 16] was also appeared…) contradict each other.
Lines 167-168. Should it be understood that the unmodified wood contained C=N and C-N, if the peaks assigned to these groups increased not appeared due to the modification?
Lines 170-171: Not clear on what bases the statement that “…GP did not react with wood components” has been made.
Line 176: Not clear in which atmosphere the experiment was performed – according to the description in the Methods section Line 126, the measurements were performed under nitrogen.
Lines 180-181: Not clear whether the wood was always or only sometimes pre-dried. It should be specified in the Methods section.
Line 200: Statistical evaluation of the data (e.g. standard deviation or standard error) should be provided in the Table.
Line 204: Transcript of abbreviations HRR and THR should be provided at the first mention.
Line 224: The same as for the Line 200.
Line 23: Not clear what “…complete carbon” does mean and how can it be assessed from a SEM image.
Lines 237-239: Not clear how the statement ”…which indicated that the polyphosphoric or phosphoric acids were produced by the degradation of GP and remain in the residual char “ can be drawn from SEM images.
Line 240: Very low release of NH3 can be noticed in Figure 6.
Line 269: What is meant with “…control cotton”?
Line 296: If the authors consider that there can be seen “…specific change rules of the contact angles”, it should be explained.
Line 299: From the Figure 8, it cannot be seen that the contact angles “…finally reach a constant”.
Line 315: Not clear how the WPG was calculated.
Lines 318, 321, 328, 393: The units of LOI and WPG should be provided after the numerical values.
Lines 351 and 377: Not clear “…formation of the glue nail between glue and wood”.
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.docx
Reviewer 3 Report
Dear Authors,
Please see my comments in the PDF.
Good luck
Comments for author File: 
Comments.pdf
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.docx
Round 2
Reviewer 2 Report
The answers to my questions have been provided in the revised version. However, the main deficiency of the manuscript, which I pointed out in my review, namely lack of discussion, has not been corrected. The section has been renamed and is now called Results and Discussion, but discussion as such, which should place the results in the context of what is or is not generally known in this field, is missing. Therefore, without an adequate discussion that includes comparison of the results with the findings of other studies, I cannot consider the manuscript to be a complete scientific publication and do not recommend it for publication.
Author Response
Responses to reviewer 2 Comments:
Thank you very much for your instructive comments and suggestions on improving the quality of our manuscript. According to your suggestions, we have revised the manuscript, and some discussions and references were added in the manuscript which were marked in red. In addition, the original discussions in our manuscript were also marked in blue, please have a check, thanks.
Reviewer 3 Report
This is acceptable.
Author Response
Thanks very much for your help in improving our manuscript.
