Experimental Study on the Butterfly Shape of the Plastic Zone around a Hole near Rock Failure

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Dear authors, you have done a great job in preparing this manuscript.

My comments:

1. on page 1, line 37, you mention 3 forms of failure (compression, tension and shear), but do not mention the theory of failure. Meanwhile, for rocks, the Coulomb-Mohr theory is used. According to the Coulomb-Mohr theory, rocks are destroyed either by tension or shear.

2. In your research you use the method of recording acoustic emission, but in the Introduction chapter it would be useful for readers to more broadly indicate the capabilities of this method from practice. For example, the articles by the author Voznesenskii, A. S. contain such information.

3. In Fig. 10, the number of events in different quadrants differs by almost five times. Perhaps in real conditions it will be the same or even more. How is this reflected in the conclusions of the manuscript?

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

The manuscript shows the case study on the butterfly shape of plastic zone.

The manuscript have a representative array of experimental data, and good visualistaion for it as well. The actuality of this manuscript is as follows: such kind of experimental results should be usefull for practical application in geothechnics.

Nevertheless, in reviewer' opinion there are some suggestions for improving the text of the manuscript to enhance its importance:

1. The Method chapter shows experimental description, with a photo of experimental device. Authors shall give the specification for all the device aparatus. Otherwise, how can the scientific community ensure reproducibility of results?

2. All the manuscript experimental data is based on this "rock sample". It seems, that authors should give the information about this sample: what is the samples origin, chemical content etc. In reviewers opinion it is the key information of all the manuscript. What kind of rock was it?

3. As it was said, the experimental results results are extensive. Therefore, I would like to see all of them in the form of a single table, so that we can identify regularities. 

If the authors take into account all the above recommendations, the article may be accepted for publication in the journal.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report

Major Comments:

1.      Method section: This section is too simple and needs to add more detailed introduction on materials, experimental procedures, or control experiments.

2.      Result section: In this section the author only needs to present the most important key results and result description. Lots of content in this section belongs to the discussion section.

3.      Discussion section: In this section, the author almost didn’t compare his study with other previous studies. I suggest adding more discussion on the strengths or weakness of these experimental or analytical methods, and more comparison studies in this section. The current discussion is not enough in depth.

4.      Result section: The author needs to rewrite this whole section. The author here only summarized the manuscript instead of presenting the most key result he received in this study. For example, Lines 290-298 are totally repeating sentences.

Best,

Moderate editing of English language is needed. There are not too many grammar errors but there a large space to make the language more concisely.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 3 Report

Thank the auhtors for the revisions. All my concerns have been resovled, I would recommend accepting the present form of the manuscript.

Please read through one more time, I still can see some grammar errors.