A Data Resource for Sulfuric Acid Reactivity of Organic Chemicals

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The manuscript by Bains et. al. illustrates the dataset of the quantitative reactivity of organic chemicals with concentrated sulfuric acid. The authors realized the influence of acid concentration, functional groups reactivity, physical condition on the kinetic parameters for different organic chemicals. The attempt to understand the reactivity of chemicals in sulfuric acid is of prime importance to the industry. It is therefore of significance to use diverse methods to assess the data on the reactivity of various chemicals in sulfuric acid. The author themselves pointed out the importance of the reaction kinetics for a set of reactions in the introduction section. Using the literature data, the data set is compiled in three different parts subjected to the single acid concentration and multiple acid concentration. Furthermore, the additional data were compiled via literature search including functional groups, solvolysis, phosphine, phenyl ring, and others. This critical inclusion by the authors provides an overview of the reactivity / kinetic parameters of a range of chemicals, which is significant from an application perspective. In any case, it would be necessary to assessed data for reaction kinetics. The authors established the relationship between reaction rate and concentration which in turn, enables comparison and contrast of kinetic parameters for different molecules. Moreover, the role of functional groups on solvolysis reaction and the influence of temperature on reaction kinetics parameters, including activation energy was illustrated. It is admirable that around 1500 papers were scanned, out of which 262 usable data with numerous compounds bearing different functionalities were studied. It is advisable to update data and perform parallel studies for nitric acid, which is also crucial for industrially important conversions. This work supposed a decent approach and will be fascinating for the readers of MDPI but, still face barriers to give it a practical application.  

Author Response

We thank the reviewer for their detailed summary and comments. The paper is up to date to mid 2020 on papers on the reactivity of sulfuric acid towards organic chemicals. The reviewer is entirely correct that reactivity to nitric acid, and particularly to combined nitric and sulfuric acid nitration reactions, would be a valuable extension to this data set. However this would be a very substantial additional piece of work. Such an analysis of nitric acid kinetics would be a major new project in its own right, and not a simple extension of the current work. We therefore respectfully suggest that we leave this for future work. We have included a short comment on nitric acid and its importance in the revised paper at the end of the introduction section.

Reviewer 2 Report

I found this paper clear and well written, and the dataset presented will be a valuable resource for many scientific areas. I have no major suggestions for edits, other than a careful spell and typo check.

Author Response

We thank the reviewer for their comments. We have carefully checked the paper for errors, and believe that we have eliminated them all.