Study on the Effects of Different Water Content Rates on the Strength and Brittle Plasticity of Limestone

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The manuscript applsci-2261419 entitled “Study on the effects of different water contents on the strength and brittleness of graystone” by Z. Quan et al. is attractive and technically interesting paper. In my opinion, the paper has great potential, which the authors have not yet managed to use. At present, however, it is a below-average work that cannot be recommended for publication unless after major revisions.

As the reviewer of this article, I have following questions and reminders to the authors:

1) The title of the article contains the word “graystone”. From the title it seems that this is the subject of the work. However, this term occurs only once in the entire article! And that in the header of table 6.

Limestone is mentioned throughout the work, why not in the title.

Limestone should also be in the list of keywords. 

2) The work contains a large number of typographical errors. It is also necessary to improve the presentation of experimental data:

a) Results are often given to an unnecessarily large number of decimal places.

b) The axes of some graphs are not described. 

3) Amount of presented data does not correspond to the systematic study. 

a) Equations describing trends and correlations cannot be responsibly derived from only four experimental points.

b) As error bars are not plotted, it is difficult to assess the extent to which the data presented are affected by experimental error.

This is especially important for this kind of work. 

b) I'm really missing information on the maximum water content that the rock can absorb due to its porosity under the given conditions.

For example, how much is that 0.1% moisture relative to water-saturated rock?

c) Only one type of limestone is analyzed. The results are not even comparable to the conclusions of similar studies.

4) The conclusions of the work only confirm the generally known facts about the influence of water on the properties of rocks.

The authors should better specify what the scientific contribution of this work is.

 

Author Response

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Reviewer 2 Report

 

In this paper, some uniaxial compression tests with different moisture content states were carried out to study the influence of moisture content on the strength and brittle plasticity of limestone. The failure forms of limestone under different moisture content conditions were analyzed, and the effects of different moisture content on the elastic modulus, uniaxial compressive strength, brittleness index B value and brittleness correction index BIM value were studied. While some of the conclusions presented in the paper are of interesting, the reviewer is of the opinion that at least the following comments should be considered and changes have to be made before the paper can be considered for publication.

 

Recommendation: major revision

 

Comments:

1.      The title information is not enough to fully reflect the research content of this paper.

2.      The number of references cited and included in the work is insufficient.

3.      It is suggested to add some numbers on the figures to help readers understand the article. The quality of these pictures needs to be highly improved.

4.      How to determine the used three BI (Eqs. 1-3) needs a brief introduction. In other words, there are dozens of methods for determining brittleness index. Why were these three chosen?

5.      The English writing is suggested to largely improve.

6.      Introduction. Kindly, improve the literature review and diverse your literature; the literature review part is not sufficient and should be introduced more. Some latest references (in recent two years) should be cited. In addition, the author also cites too many Chinese literature which  is inappropriate

7.      There are many grammatical and writing errors in this paper.

 

 

Author Response

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Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

The quality of the manuscript has improved significantly. The worst shortcomings of the work have been addressed. On the other hand, there are still a few mistakes and typos in the text. Please, read the text carefully. Furthermore, I suggest also to correct table 2, time has units in the first column and parameter “lambda” after each value. Why not do it the same way and avoid typing % repeatedly. I also wonder why the equation that U = Ue + Ud (Eq.5) is not fulfilled in the last two rows (E9 and E10) of Table 8, e.g.:

E1: 338,15 = 310,43 + 27,72 and BIM = 0,089 = 27,72/ 310,43

…but:

E9: 327,43 is not equal to 259,30 + 43,86 and BIM = 0,179 is not equal to 43,86/259,30

Furthermore, the relation that BIM = Ud/Ue is not fulfilled for these rows (E9 and E10) either (see table 9).

For these reasons, I recommend this article for publication in Applied Sciences after the minor correction.

Author Response

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Reviewer 2 Report

• The author has made some changes.However, the language problem remains serious.The author's attitude in the reply is casual and not rigorous. Last but not least,

• the author cites too many Chinese journals, which may not be suitable for international journals.

Author Response

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Round 3

Reviewer 2 Report

The manuscript can be accepted in its current form