Use of Foundry Sands in the Production of Ceramic and Geopolymers for Sustainable Construction Materials

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Manuscript ID: applsci-2328955

Manuscript Title: Use of foundry sands in the production of ceramic and geopolymers for sustainable construction materials

The authors conducted a study that aims to evaluate the possibility of reusing foundry sands from the production of cast iron as secondary raw material in the production of building materials. The paper is well-written and technically sound; however, there are a few items in the paper that need to be revised:

1-Check spelling and grammar structure throughout the paper. There should be an improvement in English grammar. I suggest editing and proofreading by native English.

2- Some references are older than 5 years old. Authors are advised to remove the old references and add or focus on the recent ones.

3-Aftre excluding the old refrences, the remaining number of refrences will be less than fifteen.

4-The author(s) might benefit from the following relevant and recent references on sustainability:

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9719563

https://doi.org/10.1007/s43452-021-00173-y

https://ascelibrary.org/doi/abs/10.1061/9780784481554.022

5-The conclusion is poor and not supported by data. In addition, it is better to re-write using a short intrudioction and summarized points.

6-Figure 4 and 5 need to be revised using different lines in order to differentiate between curves, especially when printing in black and white.

 

Author Response

According to these comments and suggestions, we have made careful modifications on the original manuscript.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

The experiments is well conducted and the article is clearly organized. It has a positive effect and provides some reference value for other researchers in the field. However, there are still several issues that merit further improvement. They are as follows:

(1) Figures 1, 7 and the other diagrams use different forms, and the other diagrams are bounded by an outline for the sake of consistency in the figure in the article, it is recommended to modify it to the same. All the figures should be re-organized. such as Fig.2 a and b had better to be redrawn in one figure. 

(2) The results and discussion show that foundry sand can achieve acceptable physical and chemical properties with replacing normal sand with foundry sand and metakaolin. It is preferable to do quantitative comparative analysis, so that readers can have clearer and more intuitive knowledges.

(3) It is sustainable to use wastes to reduce the adverse impact on the environment. It should be preferable to add a section to link the experimental results to the environmental and economic benefits.

Author Response

We are grateful to Reviewer 2 for the kind consideration and comments. According to these comments and suggestions, we have made modifications on the original manuscript.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report

The tests proposed to characterize the materials tested fully determine their physico-chemical and mechanical properties in conjunction with microstructure studies. 

 

Author Response

We thank the reviewer  for his careful reading of the manuscript and  his appreciated considerations.