A Sustainable Process to Produce Manganese and Its Alloys through Hydrogen and Aluminothermic Reduction

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

In this paper, a sustainable process to produce manganese and its alloys through hydrogen and aluminothermic reduction was proposed, the results indicate that the valorisation of industrial waste and the energy consumptions for Mn and its alloys production via this process are lower than current commercial processes. This process also helps to prevent the emission of CO₂. After reading this paper, I think the paper is well written and is suitable to public in this journal providing the following minor issues are addressed.

1 In Figure 3, the author presented the temperature curve with time for test 1, it is suggested to illustrate the curve for test 2 and test 3 in this figure.

2 On line 49, page 2, line 227, page 7, please check the form of references;

3 Please check the writing on line 292, page 9: “…these types of ores have always some iron oxides”.

Author Response

Responses to the reviewer's comments:

1: Figure 3 was improved as recommended with the addition of Test 2 and 3 curves.

2. On line 49, page 2, line 227, page 7: the references were corrected.

3. On line 292, page 9: The sentence was improved to present the suggested improvement.

Reviewer 2 Report

This paper focuses on the calculation and analysis of mass and energy balance based on experiment. The theory used is very mature and has no problem. The proposed process is feasible and has the potential to reduce carbon dioxide emission, which is in line with the current development trend of global carbon emission reduction.

The current paper has the following problems:

(1) There are many long paragraphs in the paper that are not easy to read.

(2) There are many obvious format errors in the paper.

Author Response

Response to the reviewer's comments:

1. The manuscript was reviewed and as the removal of text may affect negatively the results and  discussions, the text was not reduced in size. Unfortunately, the reviewer did not mention any specific paragraph or part of the manuscript to be improved!
2. The text was reviewed with improvements in grammar, and some format errors were corrected as recommended.