Surface Hardening Behavior of Advanced Gear Steel C61 by a Novel Solid-Solution Carburizing Process

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This paper examined that the novel solid-solution carburizing pro-cess to optimize the microstructure and properties of the carburized layer in the nano-gear steel.

By varying the treatment temperatures, the authors succeeded in producing a carburized layer that is superior to the conventional ones.

The reviewers recommend acceptance of this manuscript because of its scientific value, including detailed analysis of the carbides using TEM.

 

Author Response

Thank you for your letter and for the reviewers’ comments concerning our manuscript entitled “Surface hardening behavior of advanced gear steel C61 by a novel solid-solution carburizing process” (ID: Metals-1578080).Those comments are all valuable and very helpful for revising and improving our paper, as well as the important guiding significance to our researches. We have studied comments carefully and have made correction which we hope meet with approval. Revised portion are marked in red in the paper. The main corrections in the paper and the responds to the reviewer’s comments are as following PDF:

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

In this manuscript authors show investigation surface hardening behavior of advanced nano-gear steel by a solid-solution carburizing process. The information shown in the manuscript are interesting and the characterization methods are well chosen. Authors show some good quality images. However, before publication authors should improve some points:

1. 3. – please improve the caption by adding information about each images (a, b, c…); Is “0.1mm, …” distance from the surface?
2. Moreover please enlarge those images, improve and unify scale bar. In present form the style of the figure is quite chaotic.
3. 4, 7, 14 – please add error bars.
4. 5. – the information on each images are almost invisible – please improve.

My recommendation is: major revision

Regards

Author Response

Thank you for your letter and for the reviewers’ comments concerning our manuscript entitled “Surface hardening behavior of advanced gear steel C61 by a novel solid-solution carburizing process” (ID: Metals-1578080).Those comments are all valuable and very helpful for revising and improving our paper, as well as the important guiding significance to our researches. We have studied comments carefully and have made correction which we hope meet with approval. Revised portion are marked in red in the paper. The main corrections in the paper and the responds to the reviewer’s comments are as following PDF:

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

Dear Authors,
The article is very well done, only the exposition of the XRD results could be improved. Please modify the graphs so that the Y scale is represented as a square root (sqrt) equation. Then, the low-intensity diffraction lines will be more visible and there will be better phase analysis. In addition, please provide the ICDD PDF file numbers. 

Author Response

Thank you for your letter and for the reviewers’ comments concerning our manuscript entitled “Surface hardening behavior of advanced gear steel C61 by a novel solid-solution carburizing process” (ID: Metals-1578080).Those comments are all valuable and very helpful for revising and improving our paper, as well as the important guiding significance to our researches. We have studied comments carefully and have made correction which we hope meet with approval. Revised portion are marked in red in the paper. The main corrections in the paper and the responds to the reviewer’s comments are as following PDF:

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

Authors revised the manuscript partially. I still suggest to improve fig. 5 by i.e. use white font color – in present form the information are almost invisible. Figure 3 looks better, however before publication please enlarge and unify scale bars.

My recommendation is: minor revision

Regards

Author Response

Many thanks to the experts for their valuable comments on the work of this paper once again, which made the author's research work to a great extent.

The author revised each of them according to the comments made by the experts.As shown in the attached PDF.

If there are any questions regarding the revision of this article, we would be glad to have another academic exchange with you.

I look forward to hearing from you!

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf