Is ortho-Cresol a Viable Lignocellulosic Blendstock? A Kinetic Study of Its Co-Oxidation within a Surrogate Fuel
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Dear authors,
the paper is of scientific and original nature, related to Is ortho-cresol a viable lignocellulosic blendstock? A kinetic study of its co-oxidation within a surrogate fuel.
For a better clarification, please edit your paper as follows: Enlarge the Introduction with current results reported in the world and Europe - References to expand the results of European authors registered in SCOPUS / WoS such as: Safety requirements for mining complexes controlled in automatic mode and Simulation of wood biomass combustion in hot water boiler. Please edit the formulas and figures according to the instructions in the template. There are some grammar mistakes. Authors should check the whole text, figures, references and improve them, according to journal’s guidelines. Please, include abbreviations with their meanings directly in the text.
Conclusions and future work should be extended to contain practical applications based on research described in this paper, edit the paper according to the template. Please revise the manuscript with English grammar. There are many places that the manuscript needs to be improved with respect to English writing. Please, edit the paper according to previous comments and after minor changes I recommend the paper to be published.
Author Response
The introduction and conclusion sections have been extended to improve the description of practical applications and future work.
The abbreviations that were not defined in the original manuscript are now explained.
As for the suggested references, there are however far from the scope of this paper and were not added.
Reviewer 2 Report
Dear authors,
I have attached the comments in the attached file. I would also suggest you make the text much simpler for readers from other fields. Did you forget to upload the supplement file? Is it the way you have to provide the abstract for this journal? Try to include the values of the parameters you studied in the abstract.
Comments for author File: 
Comments.pdf
Author Response
Thanks for the review.
The minor comments have been taken into account.
- ms is the SI notation for millisecond, and was therefore not modified.
- The supplementary material is uploaded along with the revised submission.
- The term ab initio has been modified to appear in italic.
Reviewer 3 Report
The manuscript “Is·ortho-cresol a viable lignocellulosic blendstock? A kinetic study of its co-oxidation within a surrogate fuel” by Mergulhao et al. presents an experimental investigation of ortho-cresol on iso-octane reactivity in terms of ignition. Ignition delays of iso-octane blended with ortho-cresol were measured through rapid compression machine tests. It was shown that ortho-cresol has a strong inhibiting effect on the reactivity towards ignition in the negative temperature coefficient region. This was caused by the failure of radical chain-branching formation from the reaction of ortho-cresol with OH radicals. Overall, the presented experimental investigation and analyses are conducive to the engineering application in terms of bio-mass based antiknock additives. The study corresponds to the scope of the journal, the manuscript is well written, and discussions are sufficient. The reviewer recommends the manuscript to be published before minor revisions.
(1) In Figure 2, the lines are not labelled.
Author Response
Thanks for the review. The lines are now labelled in the caption of Fig. 2.
