Assessment of Interlocking Concrete Block Pavement with By-Products and Comparison with an Asphalt Pavement: A Review

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Overall, the manuscript is good at reviewing the performance of  AP and ICBP. However, here are some minor comments:

1. What are the SKILL refer to? Maybe there is a slight misunderstanding of word usage across regions.

2.  When reading every subheading, I was looking for a conclusion based on the previous works and tabulated description(summary) presented by the author. However, I could not find a conclusion that can provide own opinion/analysis by the author. However, it was presented at the end of the paper (No 8 - future directions). Not sure this is the format of the manuscript for a review paper. However, are those brief conclusions sufficient to provide a conclusion for each subheading (variable being analyzed)?

3. The number of references is good enough to provide direction for the manuscript. 

 

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

The work done in the publication adds to the science and the work done is presented in an effective and efficient way.

Author Response

The authors thank the reviewer for the comment.

Reviewer 3 Report

This paper presents performance analysis of interlocking concrete block pavement with by-products, such as coconut fibers and recycled materials from civil construction, regarding mechanical, sustainability, permeability, design, and LCA characteristics. Authors provide interesting analysis based on mechanical performance, mixture parameters, such as aggregate packing, and mixing temperature, stiffness, fatigue resistance, and many others.

Although presented article may be interesting to the readership of this journal, the paper may only be considered for publication after the following concerns have been addressed successfully in a minor revision:

1) The whole text in my opinion should be readed once again carefully and "polished" due to some stylistic mistakes (can be  found especially in abstract). These are not big problems, but understandig of the text, many repeated words and statements should be definitively corrected.

2) The Abstract should be rewritten again. It should contain a summary of the entire manuscript, and now, in my opinion, this condition is not entirely fulfilled. This part should be definitelly improved. Authors should with: "The aim of this paper is a review about..." and then describe informations about what was done, which types of pavement were dascribed and compared, and finally where the overall conclusions led to. Please put also some data, or at least the percentage results, proving that some comparative analysis has been carried out.

3) The Abbreviations section should be upgraded since some of the abbreviations (such as FlexPAVE or MeDiNa) were not included.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 4 Report

Dear Authors,

The aim of this paper is to review the performance analysis of interlocking concrete block pavement (ICBP) with by-products, such as coconut fibers and construction and demolition recycled materials, and compare skills with asphalt pavement (AP), especially for light-traffic urban road applications.

 

As weak elements

The abstract must be extended to at least 200 words. Now it is below 150 and it is too little. The paper is a Review and there are many things to highlight.

Please remove the abbreviations from the abstract and insert them in the text.

The statistics regarding the number of documents accessed/studied are only relevant to the extent that they meet the objective of the paper. In fact, the work itself, being a review type, requires such a documentation study.

The criteria stated as the perspective of documentation and review are interesting only for the authors of the work, not necessarily for other researchers who can see this documentation from another perspective.

Although I understand that it is a review, I would have liked the paper to highlight the personal contribution of the authors (to develop more of their research in the field).

 

As notable elements

With over 130 bibliographic references, the paper is very well documented and the authors  succeeded in achieving their goal.

The conclusions are consistent, well structured and relevant.

I also appreciate the effort to put together graphics and drawings that highlight and complement the explanations in the text.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx