A New Technical Concept for Water Management and Possible Uses in Future Water Systems
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
The subject of the paper is interesting, important and actual, no doubt.
However, I miss any original contribution of the paper. The introduced concepts (air balloons and ACUR) are already known.
The mathematical analysis is limited to flow volumetric balance, which is trivial. I expect for example energetic balance of the working process or something similar which could address any “scientific” problem.
I do not consider useful to publish such a popular scientific publication in a serious scientific journal, what “Water” is. I recommend to look for any other journal in which this, in my opinion good and interesting, paper fits better and could be published.
Author Response
Dear Reviewers,
Thank you for your previous comments. After receiving them we sent some emails to Assistant Editor Ms. Wang asking for some clarifications to your review, you find this as the bold text below. We didn't get any specific answers other than revise to according to the reviewers comments and resubmit. We have now made the revision, and are commenting in italic to your comments and our intial questions to the comments.
Reviewer 1 is missing original contributions since of the concepts (air balloons and ACUR) are known. This is acknowledged by the authors. However the originality lies in the new proposed applications of the concepts, we hope this is sufficient for the editors final decision. If this is a critical point we actually don’t have a work-around for it, I’m afraid. Not anything new added regarding this. Reviewer 1 is missing energetic balance of the working process, or something similar that could address any “scientific” problem. Is adding energetic balance sufficient for Reviewer 1 to change the outcome of his or hers evaluation? Reviewer 1 seems very determined that the paper is too popular, and we fear that even with energetic balance (or similar), Reviewer 1 would still be negative towards the paper in WATER journal. If so, we will have spent a lot of time on adding to the paper without any shift in the decision of Reviewer 1, and we are at status quo. We have now added a section named Energy Consideration, along with a substantial Appendix A explaining the math and development of equations. We hope this resolves any issue conserning this point. Reviewer 1 has two “must be improved” evaluations, on “research design” and “description of methods”. We agree that these points should be evaluated as being of low quality in the frame of evaluation of “conventional research”. This paper is not presenting conventional research, and these evaluation criteria seem a bit out of place. It’s like giving a low score to an elephant, based on evaluation criteria for a tiger. The obvious solution is to not have an elephant pretending to be a tiger, ie we should find a different journal. If you think this is the best solution please let us know at this point. Reviewer 2 has no comments, and states that the paper is at an acceptable stage, even if there are two “must be improved” evaluations, one for methods and one for results. Our comment is similar to the point above
Finally, some improvements on the language has been made.
Kind regards,
Pål-Tore Storli and T. Staffan Lundstrøm
Reviewer 2 Report
Paper has been revised adequately, hence it's now in an acceptable stage.
Author Response
Dear Reviewers,
Thank you for your previous comments. After receiving them we sent some emails to Assistant Editor Ms. Wang asking for some clarifications to your review, you find this as the bold text below. We didn't get any specific answers other than revise to according to the reviewers comments and resubmit. We have now made the revision, and are commenting in italic to your comments and our intial questions to the comments.
Reviewer 1 is missing original contributions since of the concepts (air balloons and ACUR) are known. This is acknowledged by the authors. However the originality lies in the new proposed applications of the concepts, we hope this is sufficient for the editors final decision. If this is a critical point we actually don’t have a work-around for it, I’m afraid. Not anything new added regarding this. Reviewer 1 is missing energetic balance of the working process, or something similar that could address any “scientific” problem. Is adding energetic balance sufficient for Reviewer 1 to change the outcome of his or hers evaluation? Reviewer 1 seems very determined that the paper is too popular, and we fear that even with energetic balance (or similar), Reviewer 1 would still be negative towards the paper in WATER journal. If so, we will have spent a lot of time on adding to the paper without any shift in the decision of Reviewer 1, and we are at status quo. We have now added a section named Energy Consideration, along with a substantial Appendix A explaining the math and development of equations. We hope this resolves any issue conserning this point. Reviewer 1 has two “must be improved” evaluations, on “research design” and “description of methods”. We agree that these points should be evaluated as being of low quality in the frame of evaluation of “conventional research”. This paper is not presenting conventional research, and these evaluation criteria seem a bit out of place. It’s like giving a low score to an elephant, based on evaluation criteria for a tiger. The obvious solution is to not have an elephant pretending to be a tiger, ie we should find a different journal. If you think this is the best solution please let us know at this point. Reviewer 2 has no comments, and states that the paper is at an acceptable stage, even if there are two “must be improved” evaluations, one for methods and one for results. Our comment is similar to the point above
Finally, some improvements on the language has been made.
Kind regards,
Pål-Tore Storli and T. Staffan Lundstrøm
This manuscript is a resubmission of an earlier submission. The following is a list of the peer review reports and author responses from that submission.
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
The subject of the paper is the water management with help of compressed air. The subject is very interesting, actual and important for many reasons. Nevertheless, the study is on a very general level introducing the principles. Several particular cases are described in details, however the description is limited on conceptual characterization, no technical details are given and analyzed.
The way of the paper is popularizing the subject to non-experts in the field, I would to say to the general public or maybe politicians. The concept is introduced to convince the reader about its usefulness. No technical details, even global technical parameters are given. The numbers are missing completely, I would expect energetic and/or mass balance in such study, at least. In a technical journal like “Water” a theoretical or feasibility study is suitable to be published. The presented form corresponds rather to an infotainment journal.
I strongly recommend to publish the paper, which I consider good and interesting, in a different journal.
Reviewer 2 Report
At the first I would like to thank Author for very interesting work. Below are a comments, which
I believe, can improve the work.
1. Line 28-36: please don’t point the text. Please use the continuous text.
2. The reference [1] in line 26 is not necessary. Just leave this reference in line 53.
3. In my opinion the Introduction is not good a part of article, where the figure can be placed. Hence it seems that the figure 1 should be removed.
4. In Introduction I would like to see information, what was the motivation for Author to conduct this study.
5. In Introduction should be clearly emphasized what is the novelty of conducted work. Actually is lack this information,
6. In Introduction the literature review should be presented, which emphasizes the analyzed problem. Author cited only five positions. In my opinion this is insufficient.
7. The name of chapter 2 should be “Methods”.
8. In my opinion the information from lines 82-101 can be placed in Introduction and need the references.
9. In chapter 3.1. is information that ACUR might be implemented at rivers and used to dampen the magnitude of the discharge at flood incidents. Does the method can be implemented in each type of catchments e.g. mountains, uplands, flats and lowlands? Each type of catchments is characterized by the specific physiographic and meteorological conditions, which have the significant impact on course of floods.
10. What about the impact of ACUR method for environmental flow?
11. In my opinion in whole chapter 3 the Author focus only on description how the ACUR method can work. I think that this part of article should be complete by the more detail results e.g. obtained from hydrological models, which will be assume the scenario including and excluding ACUR method. Also the discussion must be placed in work.
12. The references are not listed according Water MDPI requirements.
Reviewer 3 Report
the topic can be very interesting in futuristic terms but it is really difficult to accept these ideas now as feasible for many reasons, above all environmental and economic.
I do not think that we can consider this as a scientific paper but rather as a starting point for future possibilities, to be realized also because from an operational point of view they suggest very little.
