A High-Throughput Imagery Protocol to Predict Functionality upon Fractality of Carbon-Capturing Biointerfaces

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Dear Authors,

Thank you very much for the opportunity to review your work. This work has important implications for the development of CCS an CCU platforms but also to characterize the properties of adsorbents. As a reviewer, I think this is one of the most interesting works I have read recently.

The research methods used, are comprehensive enough. There are some issues [minor revision] that you must resolve before a manuscript will be published. The following are my comments.

1. The Introduction section should be corrected. In particular, the part from line 62 to line 72. The carbon dioxide issue should include emissions data, policy, and considerate technologies like CCUS. In its present form, it negatively influences the overall impression of the entire article.
2. Table S1, Supplementary material in my opinion should be included in the article
3. Line 129 “trap and bind CO₂ to pores” - should be “ Capture and bind CO₂ in pores and functional sites on the surface”
4. Please consider using instead of “physisorption” sorption or adsorption.
5. Please indicate how you determined: surface area, pore volume and pore diameter e.g. whether it's BET specific surface area from N₂ isotherms at 77K.
6. How do you understand: diameter [DP, nm] and width [WP, nm] of pores and how they were determined.
7. Subsection 2.3 could be described in more detail
8. Line 134 – Surface area should be in [m²/g] and pore volume also per gram.
9. Line 297 : By contrast, the higher the k the steeper the curve, and thus fractals are more likely to disorder the function of an adsorbent - The statement is not clear enough.
10. Line 357 : binding of acidic CO₂ to the pores and at alkaline functional sites. – should be in

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

Dear Editor and Authors.

It has been my pleasure to review the paper “A high-throughput imagery protocol to predict functionality upon fractality of carbon-capturing biointerfaces”. The authors of the manuscript have developed an imaging protocol to predict physisorption as a function of the fractal dimension of microstructural stresses. This protocol has been validated by analysing five different carbon-capturing biointerfaces. By integrating image processing and the proposed fractal analysis, they have developed micrographs for the determination of the fractality of microstructural stresses and their impact on the functionality of an adsorbent.

The topic of this paper is appropriate to the scope of Agronomy. However, some corrections and comments should be taken into consideration before accepting it.

Starting by listing a few corrections or recommendations:

Lines 131-149: itemize each point.

Line 169: sub-index in DF. Also in lines 49 and 50 as authors wrote in line 311.

Line 179 (Eq. 1): N_S instead of N(s), as line 181.

Other considerations to take into account is include Table S1 of the Supplementary Material in the main manuscript of the paper. The information in this table S1 is, in my view, as important and necessary as that shown in table 1. It is recommended to unify tables.

Review captions, e.g. Figure 4. As well as the quality of the images in Figure 1.

There is a strong need to rewrite the Introduction section. The introduction is very poor. It would be recommended to compare the authors' proposal with other proposals or methods. If these methods exist, find out the strengths and weaknesses of these methods. The discussion highlight the strengths of the proposal in contrast.

I would like to know, are the digital autoclave and the automatic pelletizer manufactured and commercial? If they are commercial, the manufacturer and model should be indicated, and if they are manufactured, a photograph or schematic would be of great interest.

I insist on a pleasure review of the manuscript submitted by the authors. I look forward to hearing from you.

Regards,

Reviewer.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx