Research on Wear Characteristics and Experiment on Internal Through-Passage Components for a New Type of Deep-Sea Mining Pump

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The quality of the paper is average, and the interest of the reader will be low. The paper is scholastic, and it looks to be more of a design process of a new mining pump than a scientific research paper. The title of the paper and the aim of the paper are confusing. The entire paper is based only on a CFD numerical simulation in Ansys with different input parameters.

There is no evidence that the authors conducted experimental research, only a few photos. They did not present the design of experiments for that, they did not mention in chapter 2, Materials and methods, anything about the experimental method used for determining the wear (they only painted with water-based paint the components and after 2 hours they evaluated, based on visual inspection, the wear). How can they measure the wear rate? Did the authors investigate from a statistical point of view the accuracy of the experimental data? In serious research the author must mention all of the above. The authors only compare the results of the CFD analysis with a few photos! I cannot tell that the CFD simulation is not honest research (and I consider that it is honest research), but I also cannot prove that “the hydraulic performance test and numerical simulation, the head, efficiency, and shaft power obtained by the test are in good agreement with the overall trends of the head, efficiency, and shaft power obtained via numerical simulation” like the authors said in the second paragraph of the conclusion chapter.

The references could be more related to the subject of the paper and some of them are very old (16 titles out of 40 are older than 10 years!!!) In few cases, the authors did not present the novelty of each reference; they only mention these references (example: Page 2, [16, 17, 18] and [31, 32, 33, 34]).

It seems that the authors don’t have any contributions in this field or they did not include any reference from their previous work.

Figure 2 has a poor quality. Anyway, I did not understand why the authors introduced that figure, only to increase the number of the pages?

What is the reason for introducing Figure 3, a and b? A photo with some control buttons and some unclear indicators (b) and another one with a pipe (a)?

How did the authors adopt the design parameters: rated flow rate Qd = 420 m³/h, a single stage head Hd = 45 m, a rated efficiency ηd = 52%, and a rated rotational speed n =1450 r/min?

Page 6, line 171, the authors said: “The entire computational area is divided into structured grids” What do the grids represent? Are they not elements? In finite element methods we speak about mesh, elements, nodes not “grids”.

I consider that for the Tabakoff particle-wall collision model the authors must put the reference.

For Figure 11 and 12 and for their explanation: It is obvious that the wear rate is proportional to the volume concentration of particles!!!!

In the Results chapter it is usual to compare the results of the paper with other results obtained by other authors. Can the authors do this comparison study?

As a conclusion, I consider that the paper must be significantly improved. The paper cannot be published in the current form.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

This paper targets clogging and wear problems in pumps that lead to low performance. A new pump was designed and tests were carried out. It was found that the results of the pump were in line with numerical modeling. The paper can be improved as per my comments.

1. The title of the manuscript needs to be improved to highlight the contents.
2. Add recommendations and future work
3. The paper may be checked in terms of academic English writing
4. The formatting of the manuscript needs to be checked
5. Line 122 "voltage of water supply" or motor?
6. Figures 2, 3,  4,  are low quality
7. Text is very small in some figures
8. The formatting of equations is not right
9. The results section is confusing. All results should be under one section "Results"
10. Line 278 "area-weighted". Why this is used?
11. Validation of the numerical model may be discussed
12. Mesh optimization should be added as well.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

The authors have improved the paper to some degree but I’m not satisfied with the responses from the authors for some points: 1, 5, 6 and 10.

Point 1. I did not ask the authors to introduce the test procedure! Please eliminate these paragraphs. I asked the authors to present some images with the measurement process, not only some photos with a painted part. I understand that they only had a visual inspection of the painted parts? They cannot compare a quantitative result obtained by FEM with a qualitative result obtained by experiment!

Point 5. What is the reason for introducing a photo with a “test master console” which only presents some buttons?

Point 6. The response is totally unrelated. I want the authors to present the scientific reason for using the specified parameters.

Point 10. The authors did not understand the importance of the study. They must present a comparison study between their results and other results obtained by other authors.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.doc

Round 3

Reviewer 1 Report

Accepted as it!