Investigating Vibration Acceleration of a Segmented Piezoelectric Ciliary-Like Body Beam for a Tactile Feedback Device

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The results, presented in the manuscript, are rather interesting and are worth publishing. However, to our opinion, the manuscript is to be seriously revised before publication. First of all, we see that the results are strongly correlating with the Ref.12 (Anisotropic Vibration Tactile Model and Human Factor Analysis for a Piezoelectric Tactile Feedback Device). It is necessary to pay more attention to what was considered earlier and what is really new in the new manuscript. The same is valid for the Ref.13 (Free Vibration Analysis for a Tactile Feedback Device of a Piezoelectric Ciliary Body Beam). Unlike Ref.12, it is not easily available, but from the preview pages it is also clear that the said paper and the manuscript have much in common.

In particular, in the referred papers the scheme of the device is described better than in a manuscript. We do not completely understand, is it the same as in the Refs. [12,13] or not, but in any case the authors are to describe it in more details (for instance, the drawings, presented in the said papers, look much more informative than the photo, shown in the Fig.1 of the manuscript), and in the case of some modifications they are also to be described separately. Also the Fig2 of the manuscript is low informative – it is to be more reasonable.

To the Reviewer opinion the use of the term “ciliary body” for the developed sensor was an extremely bad idea. Since it is a very popular term in the eye anatomy, the use of the same combination of words for quite a different device is absolutely misleading. We think that it is still not too late to correct this mistake and to introduce a better term.

There are some concerns regarding the Part 3, devoted to mathematical analysis of the system. First of all, seemingly, it to some extent repeats the material of the Refs. 12,13. Then, on the one hand, it is very long and rather complicated, and at the same time, to be honest, is still too complicated for understanding and concise. For better understanding, the model has to be explained in more details. However, on the other hand, the Reviewer invites the authors to think on the following. Of course, this model was absolutely necessary for developing the device, but is it really necessary to publish it in this paper? Are there any really new results, which were obtained theoretically and which could not have been predicted beforehand or the model was necessary only as a background for the simulation? It seems to us that the second variant is correct. Maybe it is reasonable then to describe the basics of the theory in a simple manner and outline main formulae, and publish the more extended theory elsewhere? We are leaving the decision – either to describe the theory in more details or, vice versa, to publish only the basics and main results – to authors.

English language of the manuscript has also to be checked. In most places it is quite appropriate, but sometimes we meet the phrases which we cannot decipher. Seemingly, the manuscript was translated by some high quality machine translator, but was not read out by a person with a really good English. Here we are giving a couple of such examples of the phrases, which are formally written in English, but whose sense has remained a mystery for us.

Principle, lines 96-100 “Here, we call them the ciliary body which is the main factor that produces tactile differences. One of the touch beams is shown in Figure 2. The left side length of the touch beam with a ciliary body is longer than the right. That is because the location of the area without a ciliary body is calculated to mount the piezoelectric sheets for exciting the working mode we expect.”

Discussion, lines 468-472 “The experiment results show when the touch beam in the working mode, the driving frequency is closed to result of theoretical analysis, and there a slighter deviation which is absolutely acceptable between the theoretical analysis in the vibration shapes. But we also need to impose further research to explore the more accurate solution concerning the forced response of the touch beam.”

Note that these two citations are only the examples; there are much more such cases throughout the manuscript cases.

So our recommendation is major revision. Of course, after such a revision the manuscript will require second review and, most probably, one more circle of consideration to answer more specific questions. As an example, we cannot understand how the authors plan to use in real sensors the device with piezoelements with the applied voltage of 100-200 V and without serious isolation.

Author Response

Dear reviewers,
Thank you very much for carefully reviewing the paper and giving a lot of valuable comments. Those comments are all very helpful for revising and improving our paper, as well as providing important guidance significant to our researchers. According to these comments given by you, we have carefully checked and revised the paper. The revised paper has replied to all the problems and hopes to satisfy your requirements. The revised portion is marked in red in the paper.

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

First of all, I would like to congratulate the authors for the work done because the research job presents interesting results for the scientific development of the proposed technique.

On the other hand, I would like to propose a series of improvements that I consider necessary for the article to be recommended for publication.

First of all, the language should be more careful in general, avoiding using certain vernacular sentences, and trying to resort to a more formal and scientific text.

Continuing in the context of language improvement, some parameters could be confused by how they are referred to. For example, in the case of the piezoelectric constant mentioned in the text, because there are a lot of different piezoelectric constants, for example: the piezoelectric load constant, the piezoelectric voltage constant, the piezoelectric permittivity constant ...

To continue with the report regarding the bibliography studied, the number of references cited is somewhat low, I would propose a more extensive bibliography to demonstrate that the previous study work on the state of the art has been exhaustive.

As for the development of the equations, more attention should be paid to the explanations and the definition of variables, since some coefficients are not directly determined, or are determined in other sections of the work. And as for the mathematical development carried out, it is easy to get lost since in my opinion it needs more exhaustive explanations.

Finally, it is noted that in some images the text is partially covered by the illustration,  in some graphics the legend hides the signal that the image shows, and some images used in the work have already been published previously in other works by the authors (Xing, J.; Li, H.; Liu, D. Tactile model of anisotropic vibration and human factor analysis for a piezoelectric tactile feedback device. 2019 Micromachines, Volume 10, 448.).

Respect to the last comment, I would try to avoid the publication of the same images in various works, due to the rights of the magazine on the published image, and because it may raise doubts as to the originality and novelty of the work when there are other previous publications with similar topics, and with the same graphic resources.

Author Response

Dear reviewers,
Thank you very much for carefully reviewing the paper and giving a lot of valuable comments. Those comments are all very helpful for revising and improving our paper, as well as providing important guidance significant to our researchers. According to these comments given by you, we have carefully checked and revised the paper. The revised paper has replied to all the problems and hopes to satisfy your requirements. The revised portion is marked in red in the paper. Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Good work!