Correlation between Soil Structural Parameters and Soil Adhesion Based on Water Film Theory

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report (New Reviewer)

very interesting research and edited very carefully, fluid for reading....only some  yellow indicated at the end about very small corrections, mistakes or reference to be completed

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

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Reviewer 2 Report (New Reviewer)

Dear colleagues!

Your manuscript considers the problem of soil stickiness, which has been studied quite well in classical soil physics (see, for example, the Indian review https://www.researchgate.net/publication/288004668_Earth_Handling_Problems_Due_to_Stickiness_of_Soils_Sticky_Limit_Evaluation_Measurement or a student diploma from Russia https://thepresentation.ru/geografiya/lipkost-pochv ) . And although works similar to yours on methodology have been published recently (Karami Aznadaryani et al., Geopersia, 5(1), 2015, or https://doi.org/10.2478/ata-2018-0009 ) I can't rate your manuscript above the average score for novelty and methodology. But I recommend this material for publication in Coatings, as I think it is suitable for this journal and contains interesting experimental data, as well as an attempt to interpret them using the fractal theory of sorting soil particles. The manuscript needs minor revision according to the following remarks.

1) Please indicate which soil samples you used. Most likely, these are ground and sifted samples. It is necessary to specify the size of the sieve.

2) Please refer to the well-known classical works when describing your device for determining stickiness. This is not your invention, it has been known for a very long time in physics and mechanics of soil.

3) On Figure 3, replace, perhaps, the index lines with arrows. Lines without arrows confuse the drawing, since initially it seems that these are parts of the circuit of your device

4) In physics and mechanics of soil, stickiness is expressed not by force, but by equivalent pressure. Please divide the force by the area of your steel weight and present all the data as pressure (P=F/S). Then the reader can compare the stickiness of your soils with the known data on other soils.

5) Fractals are fashionable and beautiful, but they do not give anything in understanding the physics of stickiness. But the modern theory of film moisture, film stability, physical quality of soils in connection with capillary and film mechanisms of water retention and particles interaction (see, for example https://doi.org/10.3390/agronomy11091686 ) allows you to do this. My recommendation is to recalculate the water content of the maximum stickiness (adhesion) by the relative water content W/Ws, where Ws is the saturated water content for your samples. Then the reader will be able to compare your data with others and understand which forces (most likely capillary) control mainly the stickiness of the soil (adhesion) in connection with the physical quality index W/Ws.

After taking these comments into account, the article can be published in in Coatings

17.09.2022

Best regards, your reviewer

Author Response

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Reviewer 3 Report (New Reviewer)

I cannot recommend this manuscript for publication.

The standard of English in the paper is poor. It is not clear from the abstract that experiments were performed, what was measured, and the range of values obtained: there is no quantitative information in the Abstract.

The manuscript contains false statements such as p1 L30 ‘ Research on adhesion mainly focuses on energy consumption during transportation’. The authors do not consider adhesive manufacture, heat exchanger fouling, biofilm adhesion or medical devices, for example, to be important.

The authors do not define what they mean by adhesion: they define friction as involving relative movement but not adhesion. More importantly, they do not mention the role played by the surface to which the material adheres – both in terms of chemical nature, uniformity, and surface roughness. It only becomes apparent later in the work that their probe is made from some sort of stainless steel. As a result another researcher could not repeat their work.  In their experiments, they do not mention the mass of the steel weight used and thus the overburden on the material.

They report their results in terms of a force. Scientists will expect to see the force presented as a normal stress (force/contact area) and rigorous scientists would expect the see measurements for at least two contact areas (different diameter weights) to confirm the generality of the experiments. The forces are presented without error bars or statements of uncertainty.

The particle size distribution results include parameters ‘non-uniform coefficient and coefficient of curvature’. I am not familiar with these metrics.

In equations (1) and (2) it is not helpful to use r and R as labels for particle size. The particles are highly unlikely to be spherical, which r and R suggest.

It is not clear if values of moisture content are on a dry or wet basis.

Moisture contents are reported to 4 significant figures, without uncertainty estimates.

I could not read the axes on Figure 6

The fitting to data on Figure 7 is skewed at higher values of R/Rmax, which reflects the contribution from a few, large particles. The data should be fitted between sensible limits, such as the 5% to 95% range.

Figure 9 shows that one data set does not fit the pattern, which is the one with the high clay content (see Figure 11). Why do the authors fit a common line through all the data? There is a clear effect of clay content which should be mentioned earlier.

The authors use the term ‘water ring’ when the literature will refer to a liquid bridge.

Author Response

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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

Correlation between soil structural parameters and soil adhesion based on water film theory

 

GENERAL COMMENTS

The manuscript brings news regarding the Correlation between soil structural parameters and soil adhesion relationship. However, I still lacked a practical conclusion to the study. The study is concluded in terms of fractal dimension, but a conclusion on what this means in practice is still needed, both in the Abstract and in the CONCLUSION section.

L23: “Soil clay content played a key role in soil adhesion.” This conclusion has already been endlessly posed by other studies.

 

Another point that needs to be improved a lot is English - especially in relation to the tense of some sentences.

 

MINOR COMMENTS

Table 1.: Serial number is necessary? what does that mean? I suggest you add the clay content at table 1.

 

CONCLUSION

L274-278: This paragraph is unnecessary.

Could you "translate" Fig. 8 in terms of soil particle size, rather than conclude this properly using fractal dimension.

Reviewer 2 Report

The authors run analysis of six soil samples. The manuscript is not well written and needs more work. Here are my major comments:

 

Major comments

1.     The manuscript needs an extensive English editing.

2.     Line 40:  It is a very confusing sentence. On lines 40-47 – references on the statements are missing.

3.     Line 43 “Soil adhesion force adhesive force is influenced by many factors, including…” – what does this mean?

4.     Many references are missing. The manuscript introduction needs more work and references on previous studies mentioned in the intro. They should be added.

5.     The goal and the reason of this study are poorly described.

6.     It is not clear why these six soil samples were selected for the current research

7.     It is not clear how the moisture content was measured with such a high precision (line 167)

8.     Lines 173-175 and lines 182-186: these sentences should be in the introduction section and the goal of this study should be clearly described based on the previous studies. It is missing in the current paper

9.     Line 203: “As can be seen in Fig. 6, the moisture required to reach the peak of adhesive force is different.” How different? The value needs to be added.

10.  Lines 212-219. It is well known parameter and should not be explained in the scientific paper in a detail, as well as P value.

11.  The results presented in all 12 figures are poorly described.

 

 

Some minor comments

Line 18-19. Add the country in where soil samples were collected

Line 20. It is not clear what parameters will be correlated with soil adhesion. Please add.

Lines 28-30. References are missing research works.

Paragraph (lines 31 – 36). Many references on the listed statements are missing.

Section 2.1 Province and country should be mentioned.

Line 75. What type of particle analyzer was used (add model, company, city, state, and country)?

Line 220. What does SPSS stand for? What version of the software was used?

Line 222: “R was 222 0.94993” Report 0.9499 (also, check lines 236-242).

 

 

In summary, the manuscript contains interesting data and results! However, the results presented in all 12 figures are poorly described. The introduction section is missing many references, statement of the “current issue” and clear statement why this study is needed. The experimental section is missing descriptions of the instruments and used software. This paper has numerous grammar and language issues, which need to be addressed. Unfortunately, the manuscript cannot be accepted in the current form even after major revision. It needs more work and must be re-written.