Performance of Ionic Liquid-Water Mixtures in an Acetone Cooling Application
, Tawfiq Al-Mughanam 1 and Christopher Hardacre 2Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
In the communication “Performance of Ionic Liquids in an Acetone Cooling Application” the performance of four ionic liquids as heat transfer fluids in an acetone cooling application was studied and compared with water.
An interesting application of ionic liquids has been proposed, however, the manuscript contains several aspects that must be improved in order to take into account this work for publication.
- It is necessary to know the ionic liquids used, not only the anions butanoate, hexanoate, octanoate and decanoate.
-I would like to know what characterization test and methods have been carried out to obtain the fluid properties in Table 1.
- Ecuation format must be the same (e.g. Ec (1) and Ec (4).
- Do results in Table 2 refer to effectiveness values? In affirmative case, please indicate in the text.
-Table format should be improved.
- Significant figures must be the same in all the results obtained.
- Reference [2] in line 69 should be: Huminic and Huminic [2] ...
- Reference 12 should be reviewed.
-I would propone to introduce a deeper discussion about the results obtained for the different ionic liquids used. Which one presents the best performance? What could it be attributed to?
Author Response
All comments have been addressed in the manuscript.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
The authors the results of investigation of several ionic liquids as a coolant. My concerns are as follows.
- It is difficult to catch what experiment the authors did. I strongly recommend that outline of the experiment should be provided by a scheme of figures.
- Abbreviation of ionic liquids should be revised. Although the authors abbreviated ILs used in the work, these names are nonsense. On page 2, line 65-66, they mention that “trihexyl phosphonium acetate (ACO)---. Since stable form of phosphonium cation should be (Hex)4P+, it is hard to believe that there exist such type salt. Furthermore, it they would like to abbreviate “tetrahexylphosphonium acetate”, I recommend that this should be abbreviated as “[(n-Hex)4P][OAc]. At least information of [(n-Hex)4P] should be involved in the abbreviation.
- Tables 1 and 3 should be revised. It is difficult to catch the digit accuracy.
- Explanation about Figure 1 and Table 2 should be revised more clearly.
- Page 2. Although the authors write “Oster Et al [1]”, “Et al” is incorrect. Since this word is abbreviation of “et alii or et aliae”, this part should be corrected as “Oster et al. [1]”. Numerous same mistakes found in this page.
- Page 6. The first line, “Table 3.0” is incorrect.
- Although they concluded that “water appears to have the best cooling performance”. What properties of water did contribute this result? This is the most important point in the present paper. While discussion is quite difficult to understand. They should revise the manuscript more clearly.
- There is no conclusion part in this manuscript.
Author Response
All comments are addressed in the revised manuscript.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
Authors of the Communication “Performance of Ionic Liquid-water mixtures in an Acetone Cooling Application” have considered the suggestions provided and they have also answered kindly to the comments and doubts.
I have few comments to improve the quality of the paper:
-Image resolution and text size in Figure 1 should be improved
-Line 309 “Figure 1/Table s”, I do not know which table it refers to
-Significant figures and format of Table 3 should be improved
Author Response
All concerns raised by the reviewer have been addressed.
We thank the reviewer for the help in improving the quality of the manuscript.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
The authors report the results of investigation of a mixed solvent of ionic liquids with water as possible coolant for acetone. Although the manuscript has been improved by this revision, this reviewer feels that the manuscript still needs revision. The work is a just extension of reference 1, switching a target liquid so that originality of this work is poor. I thought ILs might be appropriate for liquid which have higher boiling point and not for low boiling point liquids like acetone as the authors themselves mentioned in the previous manuscript. Initial my conclusion was rejection. However, since I also felt that the topics may become a hint for readers, who are out of this field, for considering possible application of ILs. Therefore, I recommended that the work may be published on this journal after revision. Since this is a general journal in the field of sustainability, the authors should prepare the manuscript more carefully from the standpoint of readers who are out of thermal engineering. My concerns are as follows:
- Pages 6 and 7. These pages are the core part of this paper. Although the revised manuscript has been improved compared to the previous one, I still feel it need to improve more carefully. Tables 2 and 3 involve too many figures. For Table 2, readers would be able to catch the results more easily if the results would be shown as a graph; the detailed figure should be supplied in the supporting information. Table 3 has the same problem. The core results are shown in the last two lines. I strongly recommend that the authors should show the results using a graph and detailed results should be move to the supporting information part.
- Page 7 lines 2 to 3 from the top: Although the authors just report the results as “the HX area is 4 times smaller --- the ionic liquid-water mixtures.“ This part lacks explanation. I recommend that the authors should add a passage after this sentence, like “This indicates that the efficiency of IL mixtures are insufficient as coolant for acetone”.
- Although they abbreviate carboxylic anions like “butanoate ([ButO]-)” etc. following to reference [1], I worry about that many chemists image “ButO” as “butoxide= alkoxide anion”. Since butanoate is “C3H7COO-“ and not match butyl, they used this abbreviation, I suppose. To avoid misunderstanding, I recommend that list of cations and anions of ILs should be shown as chemical figure.
- The authors should provide a response letter for reviewers and mention how they changed the manuscript according to the comments by referees.
Author Response
Most concerns raised by the reviewer have been addressed.
We thank the reviewer for the help in improving the quality of the manuscript.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 3
Reviewer 2 Report
I have found that almost parts have now been revised to acceptable level for publication on this journal. The rest is the problem of abbreviation of ILs. I still believe that such confusing name should be avoided, though this was responsible to Manchester’s team. To improve the text, I recommend that you should revise the corresponding sentence on page 2 more carefully for explaining these compounds.
Page 2 line 5: “-coupled with butanoate ([ButO]-: C3H7COO-) , hexanoate ([HexO]-: n-C5H11COO-), octanoate ([OctO]-: n-C7H15COO-), and decanoate ([DecO]-: n-C9H19COO-).”
Author Response
The authors sincerely thank the reviewer for their help in improving the quality of the manuscript. Kindly let us know if we have overlooked something.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
