Laboratory-Scale Research of Non-Catalyzed Supercritical Alcohol Process for Continuous Biodiesel Production

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The manuscript proposed by the authors is very valuable and increase knowledge about biodiesel production technology, especially in the field of non-catalyzed process. Research novelty is clear and concerns the production of biodiesel in a new type of reactor. This  new reactor involving preheating and pre-mixing of the methanol/oil mixture to reduce setup cost and increase biodiesel yield. This is a novel approach, so every new study makes a major contribution to this area. The subject of aticle is in line with a Journal scope. The article is written correctly and it can be published after major corrections concerning mainly the Introduction, Experimental Section and Result and discussion. The scientific level of the article is good, but the presentation of the results needs to be improved.

Lines 27-31 there is no quotations supporting these statements

Line 52 abbreviation for WCO should be in Line 32 for example.

Line 67 on the graph there is no unit on the pressure axis, on the graph Pcm is given in psi unit and in the text (Line 66) the pressure is in bar - these units should be uniform throughout the text

Line 87-94 please remove the bullets

Line 180 Setup sketch is unreadable you should enlarge sections 1-4 and set sections 3 and 4 under section 1 and 2

Line 195 this standard is not listed in References

Line 195 these dimensions are given in mm and the reactor dimensions in inches, please standardize the units preferably to the metric system

Line 243 Yield axis – schould be FAME

Line 285 in all paragraph the temperature is given in K so why in this line it is in C? In the rest of the text, the authors also use K and C interchangeably, it would be better to unify the units

Author Contribution – please complete

Funding – please complete

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

The article is interesting and actual.

It is well written and will be of interest to the readers.

The introductory section must be expanded and more information must be added. For example, the importance of these achievements may have for the development of new process methodologies that can be used in biodiesel industry.

The authors used K as the temperature unit all over the article. However, in Figure 3 there is a temperature in ºC. Please, use uniform nomenclature all over the text.

Figure 5 is irrelevant, should be eliminated.

Discussion section could include some references to the scale-up constraints and large scale industrial production.

 

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

The authors have corrected the text in accordance with my suggestions, so the article can be published in present form