Unpacking Additive Manufacturing Challenges and Opportunities in Moving towards Sustainability: An Exploratory Study

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This paper intends to better understand the challenges in sustainable adoption of AM and find the solutions. We believe the authors have done a lot of work to collect data and conduct analysis. But all the identified challenges and solutions are just the perspectives of the interviewees or the authors, and they are not validated. Therefore, I suggest the paper for publication as the following comments are addressed. 

 

1.     The identified challenges and solutions are just the perspectives of the authors and not validated. Could the authors give discussions on why their statements are valid or how to validate?

2.     Whether the 6 companies, 34 interviews and 25 participants are representative enough to draw the conclusions in the paper?

3.     The 6 companies are from USA, China and Japan. Why are they chosen from these three countries? Could the authors provide the exact information of the six companies?

4.     While the coding approach in [8] is applied to explore the connections between different categories, what are the contribution of this paper?

5.     Could the authors state the main points of the research methods more clearly? How do other researches gain from the proposed research methods?

6.     The text in the tables and figures is not clear.

7.     In the Table 1, whether AM has limitations in “Supply chain-related”?

8.     The literature background is quite similar to the introduction. The authors present their perspectives, but the contributions of other researchers are not clearly pointed out.  

9.     In Table 4, for the challenges that have existed in literatures and been confirmed by the authors, could the authors provide the references?

10.  Note that some of identified challenges have been partially or fully addressed.   

Author Response

Thanks for your valuable comments. Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

The author/s shows the exploratory Study in the area of additive manufacturing toward sustainability. The author demonstrates a sufficient understanding of the research issue. The author did a thorough review of the literature. The contents are significant and wide-ranging enough to span the broader field of research. I would be happy to accept the paper in its present form. It is suggested to improve the quality of the tables for better reading as they look like a picture with low resolution.

30/01/23: Reviewer appreciated the technical content of this work. However, The quality of the paper should be greatly improved to make it readable. Several grammatical, punctuation, typographical errors, awkward phrases, and unclear sentences must be corrected. Kindly relook at the language throughout the manuscript.

Author Response

Thanks for your valuable comments. The quality and resolution of Tables and Figures are improved and more readable now.  The grammatical issues and typographical errors are corrected and improved. Please see the revised paper.

Reviewer 3 Report

The article addresses current problems in the implementation of additive manufacturing, identifying and proposing alternative solutions.

I believe it is adequate and relevant to address current issues related to sustainability processes in the field of additive manufacturing.

Tables 1, 2, 5, 6 and 7 should be better presented to make them more readable.

Author Response

Thanks for your valuable comments. The quality and resolution of Tables 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 and Figures 1, 2 are improved and more readable now.

Please see the tables and figures in the revised paper.

 

Reviewer 4 Report

This paper studies unpacking additive manufacturing challenges and opportunities in moving towards sustainability, which has potential guide to engineering. In order to meet the requirements of high-quality publication of the "Sustainability" journal, it is recommended to consider the following suggestions,

 

1) There is no key quantitative data in Abstract Section.

2) Introduction Section needs to be rewritten. In addition to additive manufacturing, is other non-traditional machining feasible for fabricating in moving towards sustainability? What are the advantages and disadvantages of each? You need to give your own analysis in this section. The following references may have some value and significance, so you can consider quoting them.

[1] Progress in non-traditionalmachining of amorphous alloys[J]. Ceram Int, 2023, 49(2):1585–1604. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ceramint.2022.10.349

[2] Review of Sustainability Issues in Non-Traditional Machining Processes[J]. Procedia Manufacturing, 2016, 7:714-720.

3) The serial number of references should be arranged from 1 to N.

4) The innovation of this article is not reflected in the first section and needs to be modified.

5) The second Section needs to add pictures relating all kinds of additive manufacturing.

6) There are too many text in Table 3 .

7) Table 4 is too long and needs to be placed in the appendix.

8) There is no quantitative data in the Conclusion Section.

9) There are few references in the last three years.

Author Response

Thanks for your valuable comments. Please see the attachment.

 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

My comments have been satisfactorily addressed.