Smart Infrastructure Monitoring through Self-Sensing Composite Sensors and Systems: A Study on Smart Concrete Sensors with Varying Carbon-Based Filler^†

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The work is interesting and well written. Aside from introducing to the potentialities of smart infrastructure monitoring, the work presents an experimental study on composite samples at small and medium scales aiming at understanding the effect of different fillers on the sensitivity of composite samples to strain variation.

I surely advise the work for possible publication.

Some aspects could be modified to improve the readability and the interest of the work.

(i) The introduction is quite long and it could better organised. In particular, the content of Sec. 3 "State-of-art" on smart materials for SHM could be integrated in Sec. 1 "Introduction".

(ii) Some reference miss: please specify a reference for the cited LABVIEW environment. It would also nice to know in which laboratory the SEM inspections took places.

(iii) The authors could provide an idea of the cost, in percentage terms, of including fillers with respect to the total construction cost.

(iv) The authors could deepen the possibility of integrating the discussed smart infrastructure monitoring with the more traditional vibration based monitoring.

(v) the quality of the graphs should be improved. Label font size should be enrlarged in almost each figure. Plot line widths should be increased in Figures 8, 9 and 11. The sample marker size in Figures 8 and 9 should be equal to the one used in FIgure 10. The label font size in Figure 10 should be equal to the one used in Fig. 8 and 9.

I suggest to accept the manuscript after minor revision, but I strongly suggest to modify the figures to improve readability.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

The article presents interesting results based on laboratory experimentation of graphite-cement slab sample during electromechanical tests. The following points are kindly requested to be addressed further in the article:

• Introduction and Smart sensing principles sections: Please include references (not even one reference is currently included in both sections)
• The current version of the article consists of approx. 25% of self-citations. Please balance the citations to an appropriate level.
• 3. State-of-art on smart materials for SHM: this appears as one block of paragraph. Please divide in paragraphs so it is easy for the reader.
• Lines 153-160: Authors need to clarify how the present study goes beyond the current state of the art and how it differs from previous published articles (in particular other articles published by the main author). This point need to be addressed clearly in the article.

Author Response

Please see the attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf