Bionic Design of a Winding Roller and Experiments for Cleaning Long Foreign Matter from Raw Cotton
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
The paper deals with an interesting topic which can be included in the general term of frugal innovation. The paper has potential but several issues have been raised by the reviewers and must addressed by the authors.
1. The authors are requested to elaborate the introduction in order to present the current manufacturing landscape (e.g., Industry 4.0) and the necessity to incorporate digital manufacturing technologies to existing traditional machine-harvest techniques. Useful papers in the field of Industry 4.0 can be found in the following recently published research works:
a. Mourtzis, D., Angelopoulos, J. and Panopoulos, N., 2022. Digital Manufacturing: the evolution of traditional manufacturing toward an automated and interoperable Smart Manufacturing Ecosystem. In The Digital Supply Chain (pp. 27-45). Elsevier.
b. Mourtzis, Dimitris (Book). Design and operation of production networks for mass personalization in the era of cloud technology (2021), pp. 1 - 393. DOI: 10.1016/C2019-0-05325-3
2. The authors state that “Currently, the pre-cleaning of the LFMs in raw cotton are mostly picked by hand in Chinese enterprises, which will result in high price of the human cost and low production efficiency”. Please refer indicatively the rise in human cost as well as the decrease in production efficiency.
3. Please elaborate this phrase. The meaning is difficult to be understood “Unfortunately, seldom corresponding automated mechanical equipment are developed up to now, the reasons can be concluded as follows”.
4. The authors should add a research question and highlight the literature gap of the paper.
5. The structure of the remainder of the paper should be included at the end of Introduction.
6. The paper does not have a literature review section. Some general studies have been included in the Introduction but it is important to add a Literature review section to present the current trends and the novelty of this paper in comparison to the state-of-the-art.
7. The contribution of Section 2.1 to the manufacturing field is questionable. Please elaborate.
8. Table 2 is too simple for a scientific paper. Please either elaborate or remove it and integrate the content in the body of the paper.
9. It is important to proofread the paper, there are several typos (e.g., factors).
10. It is suggested to add a detailed flowchart of the experimental method.
11. The conclusions section is too brief please elaborate.
12. Please add future work ideas.
Author Response
please refer to the attachment
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
The work is interesting as it proposed a solution to remove LFMs from the cotton fibres. The work can be published after having a major revision and addressing the following comments.
1. The motivation from the comb-like gill raker in a carp for developing a LFMs removal winding roller was mentioned just in only one sentence in the introduction section. Probably a bit more discussion could be given in the introduction section which will make the novelty aspect of the paper more clearer to the reader.
2. Author should include a short description how the proposed winding roller design mimicked the gill morphology. It was not very clear, at-least to me.
3. Any literature reference for the feeding roller speed 3-5 rev/min?
4. What was the motivation for three stage multi-roller cleaning system ( why not two or four rollers cleaning system)?
5. No reference was used for the feeding roller deflection equation? Carefully provide details of the equation as there were some missing information.
6. The details of the winding roller space (200 mm), roller shaft diameter (30 mm) and the tooth length were not very convincing. Author should elaborate this description.
7. Results and discussion should be described more. The calculation and Table 5 data should be presented and described properly to understand the results easily.
8. 20 gm LFMs was mixed with 1 ton of raw cotton- was it done following any experimental or industrial standard?
9. Table 6 was not found in the manuscript, although it was mentioned in line no. 250.
10. Figure 7 should be described more.
11. No discussion about the performance of the proposed winding roller, whether it has enough capability to clean the fibres. Is it enough according to industry standard?
12. Limitation and future work of this investigation were not mentioned.
Author Response
please refer to the attachment
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
The authors have revised the manuscript taking into consideration the comments raised by the reviewers.
However, there is a minor comment regarding the added reference No.7. The correct citation is a follows:
Mourtzis, D., Angelopoulos, J. and Panopoulos, N., 2022. Digital Manufacturing: The evolution of traditional manufacturing toward an automated and interoperable Smart Manufacturing Ecosystem. In The Digital Supply Chain (pp. 27-45). Elsevier. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-323-91614-1.00002-2
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.docx
Reviewer 2 Report
The quality of the work has been improved after the revision. The authors addressed my concerns and this work can be published. Just need to check some small spelling corrections, such as - line 65 tonday; line 307 and so on.
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.docx
