Electronic Life Cycle Monitoring System for Various Types of Lead Acid Batteries
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report (Previous Reviewer 1)
I suggest this manuscript can be accepted.
Author Response
The reviewer did not provide any comments.
Reviewer 2 Report (New Reviewer)
The proposed work entitled “Electronic life cycle monitoring system for various types of lead acid batteries” has some element of novelty. The work has been carried out systematically but there is a some changes required before manuscript can be accepted for publication. I have following concerns:
[1] What are other automatic systems available in the literature or on market? How this system differs from the already available systems?. Authors can discuss this in introduction section.
[2] Is it possible to monitor Lithium ion batteries with this set up?
[3] Since now a days many such systems are coming to the market cost factor is a main concern.
[4] Since authors have tested 4 types of lead-based batteries and made a conclusion. Do authors think this is enough or more batteries can be tested in order to come up with a solid conclusion.
[5] The manuscript has been presented in a systematic way, but it is still not free from typing and grammatical errors.
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.docx
This manuscript is a resubmission of an earlier submission. The following is a list of the peer review reports and author responses from that submission.
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
The authors created an automatic system for monitoring of the working characteristic and parameters of lead acid batteries. This system has practical value to some extent, but it lacks innovation. In addition, there are some points the authors may consider.
1. The structure of this manuscript needs to be adjusted. This paper focuses on battery monitoring system, however, the authors took up a lot of space on lead acid batteries in the introduction section.
2. Insufficient battery testing. The experimental conclusion needs more detailed data support.
Author Response
Please see the attachment
Author Response File: Author Response.docx
Reviewer 2 Report
This manuscript creates an automatic system for monitoring of the working characteristics and parameters of batteries were created to make the research process of various types 8 of batteries automatic. Based on the ATmega328 microcontrollers system management, g languages C and Delphi. With this system, the charging and degradation process of four types of batteries was studied. Overall, this manuscript is well organized, the logical flow is acceptable, the data is solid and the conclusion is reasonable. Herein, I suggest this manuscript can be accepted after minor revision.
1. The writing of this manuscript needs further revision, some long sentences and hard-to-read sentences need to be simplified, and some grammar mistake needs further correction.
2. One of the main innovations of this manuscript is the high performance, however, the specific data of Figure 14 seems not provided, an author provide further proofs to support this issue? Or just provide the full version of Figure 14.
3. How is the coulombic efficiency of the 4 batteries in this manuscript? Can you provide some data?
Author Response
Please see the attachment
Author Response File: Author Response.docx
Reviewer 3 Report
In this manuscript the authors propose a system for monitoring the operation of lead-acid (and other) batteries. The design and process of the system fabrication, a description of the software environment for controlling the resulting device, as well as an example of its implementation are presented.
The structure of the presented work is consistent, and each stage of prototyping, manufacturing, programming and testing is presented in a sufficient and clear manner. Although the overall quality of the paper is quite good, I have a few comments (mainly concerning the unclear motivation for the paper and a few unsupported theses) that need to be addressed before publication in Applied Sciences.
1) The introduction is too large and the motivation for the research unclear. In the introduction, the authors cite well-known and therefore redundant information about the increasing need for electricity and the need for batteries to provide stable energy from renewable energy sources. Therefore, the fragment from "As the number of people..." to "power peak compensation processes [16-18]" should be significantly reduced. In addition, the classification of lead-acid batteries with the advantages and disadvantages also looks somewhat redundant.
Nevertheless, from the introduction, the need for battery monitoring devices becomes apparent. However, battery management systems for such a mature technology as lead-acid batteries are widely known. In addition, battery testers for such batteries (including large ones) are available for purchase everywhere. Therefore, the authors of the paper need to be more explicit about what exactly is the motivation behind their device? Perhaps their device is much cheaper, easier to scale, or easy to make even for non-professionals. This needs to be clarified at the end of the introduction.
2) "This battery testing system is universal and can be applied to any type of battery (lithium-ion, etc.) simply by entering the experimental conditions according to the type of battery being tested." This thesis was not supported. In fact, the proposed device can be used for batteries with a voltage range comparable to lead-acid batteries. The question is, is the device compatible with laboratory prototype batteries with voltages of less than 5 volts or with industrial energy storage batteries with voltages of tens of volts, for example? Can the system be modified for such applications?
3) A thesis on the possibility of using the proposed device for real cases. In the paper, the authors give an example of charging batteries from the mains with stable characteristics. But as I pointed out above, industrial manufacturers have many options available for battery testing systems. The question is, is it possible to use the proposed device to charge batteries from renewable energy sources, for example? Perhaps the availability of the device's circuitry, software, and ease of fabrication would allow such a system to be used for smart-grid applications such as those with solar panels?
4) It is not entirely clear from the manuscript how resilient the proposed system is to abnormal situations. For example, it is interesting to know how sensitive the device and the software are to noise in the measured data, temperature fluctuations, circuit breakage, or, for example, sudden voltage spikes due to some kind of battery degradation. In addition, it is necessary to know whether there are mechanisms in the program to protect the user and the batteries from setting wrong values of the test parameters.
Author Response
Please see the attachment
Author Response File: Author Response.docx
Reviewer 4 Report
Research must be continued; the management system should also be tested on other types of batteries (Li-ion, Ni-MH)
Author Response
The reviewer did not provide any comments.
