Typhoon-Resistant Performance Assessment of Coastal Rural Residential Keel Brick Walls Reinforced with High Ductility Concrete
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Article presents the issue of keel brick walls performance against typhoons in the case of rural houses. The authors conducted tests on the lateral force resistance of keel brick walls reinforced with high ductility concrete and mortar.
These are important issues for the region under analysis (Ningbo), although it should be noted that the application of the keel brick walls is limited in other parts of the globe. Despite the fact that the work refers to highly local material, the scientific value of the article itself may be beneficial to other researchers due to:
- determination of the 600-year near-surface typhoon wind speeds that affects certain area with the use of typhoon full-track simulation and wind field simulation technology,
- formulation of a joint probability distribution model of multi-directional extreme wind speed with the use of t-Copula function in order to define a mixed wind climate,
- suggested solutions related to the reinforcement of brick walls with different materials.
The biggest drawback is the lack of discussion of the results. A discussion would be warranted to confirm the validity of the adopted research methodology (e.g. comparison against the achievements of other researchers in these aspects, or justification that the steel plate represents correctly the real impact of wind on the wall).
Minor flaws can also be noted in the work:
- Figures 7, 15 and 20 are not useful since the same values are given in the text and the relationships, as you might expect, are linear. It is worth considering removing these graphs or replacing them with graphs that will present more content, e.g., box and whisker plots,
- Table 5 should contain 4 columns,
- There are minor editing errors in the paper, e.g. line 439 starts with a comma.
Author Response
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Author Response File: 
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Reviewer 2 Report
This paper has the following problems:
(1) The paper studies the Typhoon-resistant performance of brick walls reinforced with high ductility concrete. However, there are no mechanical formulations for this problem. To find the resistant of a structure, equations based on mechanics are necessary. Otherwise, how to find the resistant is not clear.
(2) The compressive stress of the brick was obtained from experiments, but the failure of the wall should be the combination of axial forces and bending moments. Thus, the ultimate tension stress should be the failure criterion of the brick wall. The authors should discuss this issue.
(3) The authors used the test listed in Section 3.3 to simulate the wind load without any explanation. The wind load may be very different from the experimental load, do the authors should discuss this problem.
(4) To get the wind speed in Table 2 should be a mature process, and the authors discussing a lot of paragraph in this part is not help for the contribution of this paper.
(5) The results of Section 5.1 were calculated according to a reference. Thus, the contribution of this section is not high.
(6) Table 5 also was the list of the extreme wind speed, which is not new in many fields.
From the above issues, the big problem of this paper is that the contribution is not high, and the most importance of the failure criterion of the brick wall was not discussed in this paper. However, the main purpose of this paper is to discuss the resistant of the brick wall.
Author Response
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Reviewer 3 Report
In the paper entitled “Typhoon-resistant performance assessment of coastal rural residential keel brick walls reinforced with high ductility concrete”, the keel brick walls of rural houses in the Ningbo area were taken as the research object, a framework for evaluating the performance of keel brick walls against typhoons was established, tests on the lateral force resistance of keel brick walls reinforced with high ductility concrete and mortar were carried out. The results show that the high ductility concrete reinforcement has great advantages over mortar reinforcement and avoids brittle damage of the masonry structure.
COMMENTS
- IN MANY PLACES IN TEXT AND SOME FIGS (15,20]: kN [NOT KN].
- Figure 7., IN VERTICAL AXIS: ...MPa [NOT Mpa].
- The Introduction and the References must be enriched with some relevant recent articles in International Journals in the English Language.
- Copyright permission should be asked for Figure 3. Detail of keel brick wall (Wang and Liu, 2013).
Author Response
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Author Response File: Author Response.docx
Round 2
Reviewer 2 Report
For question 7, this paper only used experiments to study the wall failure under a strong wind, and the failure criterion was not studied in this paper. Thus, the authors should mention this issue in the paper, so that people can realize the condition of this paper.
Author Response
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