Influence of Segmented Rolls on Homogeneity of Cooling in Continuous Casting
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
1) What is the relationship between the continuous caster and the main content of this paper?
2) The main content in your abstract is the description of your experimental study.
3) In your abstract, the cooling inhomogeneity caused by segmented rolls should be the subject of the current work. However, the analysis on this subject cannot be obtained in this work.
4) In your introduction, you should do more research on the background.
5) There is too little introduction to the experiment. Can you guarantee that anyone else can copy your experiment from your description?
6) The quality of the pictures in this paper is very poor.
7) There is no discussion about the results of your experiments. What is more, the experimental results are of no significance. What is the relationship between the results and the title?
Author Response
1) The explanation has been added to Abstract and Introduction.
2) The main results have been added to the abstract and the description of the experiment has been reduced.
3) The abstract and conclusion have been edited to highlight the results.
4) Introduction has been extended. However, please note that only few publications has been published on this topic. If you are missing something specific, please let us know. We will appreciate it.
5) We believe that the description of the experiment is sufficient for possible repetition. The dimensions of the sample including the cylinders and the gaps between them are given. The distances, water flow rates, operating pressures of water and air in the nozzles are also described. If you are missing something specific, please let us know.
6) We don't see any problem with the quality of the images. Can you be more specific? Please note that it is difficult to take excellent picture when there is lot of spraying water.
7) The conclusion has been corrected to make it clearer.
Reviewer 2 Report
The work is interesting and useful. It can be seen that a lot of work has been invested in the experimental part. But after reading it, there is a feeling that there are not so much the results presented. Nevertheless, the work can be recommended for publication. However, if the authors do not find it difficult, then, perhaps, it should be prescribed in more detail, with a quantitative (and not only qualitative) analysis, why the thickness of 5 mm was chosen. This could be useful to other researchers in this area.
A couple of technical notes:
- The reference to figure 9 appears ahead of the link to figure 8.
- It is perhaps more appropriate for some of the text on lines 190-219 to be in “2. Experimental Technique”.
- If the lines 190-219 will be moved to paragraph 2, then the “Conclusion” section becomes only slightly smaller in volume than the “3. Results”. So, I think that the authors should more compactly formulate the main results in the last section.
- Line 222. Perhaps the sentence “Relative cooling rates for different flow rates are shown in Figures 10-12” is redundant, since it was already mentioned above.
Author Response
The optimum sample thickness was chosen based on experimental experience and could vary considerably depending on the measurement procedures used. For normal cooling experiments with motion, we would use a thinner material depending on the sample velocity. More complex sample handling and the need to avoid deformation led us to a thickness of 5 mm. Explanation has been add to the paper in page 4.
1) The order of the pictures has been changed.
2) The text has been moved to Experimental Technique and its subchapter "2.2 Hot Tests". (Please note that this movement is not tracked in the Word document).
3) Part of the information from the conclusion has been moved to the results.
4) The redundant sentence has been deleted.
Reviewer 3 Report
For the hot test it is necessary to heat up the setup beforehand. It is not clear how this heating has been carried out and how the temperature value has been controlled.
Please describe this process a little more detailed.
It would be interesting to incorporate numerical models adjusting the influence of the different parameters studied. If this is not possible, perhaps some comments could be made in the conclusions.
Author Response
The heating was described in more detail.
Thank you for suggestion for next research. The numerical model of the experiment is far beyond this paper because it includes twin‑fluid flow model with evaporation and phase change. We are presently developing such complicated models, but it will need much more effort to describe the reality sufficiently. Some comments were added to the conclusion.
