Influence of Processing Parameters on Coating Removal for High Pressure Water Jet Technology Based on Wall-Climbing Robot
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
The paper entitle “Influence of Machining Parameters on Coating Removal for High Pressure Wter Jet Technology Based on Wall-climbing Robot” presents an elegant approach to strip the paints and dust removal from the ship hull. The surface of the ships are ferromagnetic hence the magnetic adhesion technique is used for the wall, i.e., vertical surface climbing of the robot. The paint stripping or coating removal experiment depends upon multiple factors, namely, water jet pressure, travelling speed, inclined angle and offset distance of the nozzle form the ship surface. The paper presented is useful but the following aspects need to be addressed:
Figure 1 should be labelled for the clear understanding of the components.
The challenges faced during the ship hull cleaning should be listed in the introduction along with the typical standards references or guidelines for the ship cleaning and inspection task.
Line 67: What are the parameters during the waterjet process mentioned by the author? I noticed that three parameters are mentioned in section 3.1. It will be easier to read if the author specify these parameters here as well.
Line 78: What do authors mean by “However, the ALE formulation is relatively expensive.”? Does that referring to more computational power required?
Line 81: The author first mentioned about the significance of theoretical studies, however, here the authors mentioned back on experimental results. It is a bit confusing for readers to understand the focus of the paper.
Line 96: The author claim that the robot should move flexibly, however, according to the design shown in Figure 1, the robot is equipped with a magnetic track that is not a system with high manoeuvrability.
Figure 1: The figure seems not showing the full robot clear
Line 119: The sentence “Then the high-pressure water is impact to the …” has grammar mistake.
Line 120: The sentence “During the whole coating…” is confusing to readers. The impact of the vacuum recovery system is not clear.
Figure 4: The notations in the figure seem not correspond with the that in the paragraph. Do “stage 1”, “stage 2” and “stage 3” are the same as “region 1”, “region 2” and “region3”?
Line 144: Capital letter “The”.
Line 145: What are manual means?
Line 151: The validation procedure by the coating thickness gauge are not straight forward for readers to understand. Also, is there a more accurate way to validate the result? As the higher the value of w, the better the coating removal effect is, can I assume that the damage caused by the water jet will not be considered or even considered as higher efficiency?
The conclusion can present the highlight the findings in a pointwise manner.
Overall the presentation of the work is good.
The experiment section should be presented more scientifically using the design of experiments techniques. This works present the useful robotic architecture for the ship hull inspection task. The authors are encouraged to perform DOE and share the findings with the scientific community and engineers.
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.docx
Reviewer 2 Report
This paper deals with the influence of machining parameters on coating removal for water jet technology applied with a magnetic adhesion wall-climbing robot in the shipbuilding industry. The topic of the paper is interesting and suitable for the journal. The paper is generally well written and technically sound.
The following should be clarified:
Other than the magnetic tracks, several climbing techniques can be found in the literature. The authors should briefly recall the advantages of the proposed magnetic climbing robot with respect to other approaches for wall-climbing robots.
What are the performance of the proposed device with respect to other techniques (such as sand-blasting process) in terms of coating removal speed and quality of the results?
The proposed mobile robot seems small to complete the coating removal for very large ships with just one robot. Has the proposed approach to be extended to fleets of climbing robots? Can the size of the robot be increased? Please briefly discuss this point.
The water jet produces a force which contrasts the attractive magnetic force of the robot tracks. Which are the limit conditions in terms water pressure and speed before the robot fall down? What is the maximum attractive force between the tracks and the metal surface? Please discuss about this point.
Why a climbing robot is more efficient than a mobile lifting platform for the coating removal?
The authors should add some more examples of recently published papers dealing with wall-climbing robots to the Introduction. For example, I suggest the following references:
Seriani, S., Scalera, L., Caruso, M., Gasparetto, A., & Gallina, P. (2019). Upside-Down Robots: Modeling and Experimental Validation of Magnetic-Adhesion Mobile Systems. Robotics, 8(2), 41.
Chen, X., Wu, Y., Hao, H., Shi, H., & Huang, H. (2019). Tracked Wall-Climbing Robot for Calibration of Large Vertical Metal Tanks. Applied Sciences, 9(13), 2671.
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.docx
Round 2
Reviewer 2 Report
The authors improved the manuscript by following all my comments and suggestions. Therefore, I suggest the paper to be accepted in the present form.
