Response Surface Analysis of Fenobucarb Removal by Electrochemically Generated Chlorine

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Le et al investigated the electrochemical formation of active chlorine and their subsequent use for degradation of the pesticide, Fenobucarb.

The choice of experiments and figures to highlight the findings of the investigation seem logical and well planned. Overall, I am in favor of the manuscript, however, the grammatical errors and poor sentence construction is a bit too apparent, thereby rendering the manuscript in its current form not ft for publications. It is advised that the manuscript undergoes major text editing. Examples are few are listed below:

Line 13: remove the word "screen"

Line 15: unnecessary space before ")"

Line 22: "oxidizes" does not fit in very well in this sentence

Line 71: vairiables" ??

The above are examples of multiple grammatical errors and poor sentence structure throughout the manuscript. All of these need to be fixed.  

Author Response

Thanks for the reviewer’s observation. The authors have revised this problem as the reviewer suggested (see more in green highlight throughout the revised manuscript).

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Review for “Experimental-design-guided approach for the removal of fenobucarb by the electrochemical-chlorine technique”

This is a revised manuscript based on previous “Degradation of Fenobucarb by Electrochemical Oxidation Process: Influencing Factors, Factorial Design, and Intermediates Identification”. As I can see, notable improvements have been made, especially the language. The highlighted part in yellow indicated that it has been revised. I found that other parts need extensive language editing in the same way.

Besides, please address my following questions.

1. title is suggested to change to “Response surface analysis of fenobucarb removal by the electrochemically generated chlorine”.

2. the pie figures of mass balance are not really necessary, because they have been stated in the text.

3. the last item of the conclusion section is not really drawn from this study. It is not proper to include it here.

4. the drawing of figure 1 needs to be improved.

Author Response

Thanks for the reviewer’s observation. The authors have revised this problem as the reviewer suggested (see more in green highlight throughout the revised manuscript).

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

The manuscript has been improved significantly. I have no question about the technical results. However, I would suggest the authors send their paper out for revision by a native speaker before acceptance. There are a few ambiguous phrases and grammar errors, such as "electrochemical pollutants" in line 44 of page 2, and "is only play" in line 51 of the same page. There are several other places like this. Again, the technical soundness has met the publication standard. Rather, I'm concerned with language quality.

Author Response

Thank you for your comments and suggestions

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

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

Review on “Degradation of Fenobucarb by Electrochemical Oxidation Process: Influencing Factors, Factorial Design, and Intermediates Identification”

General comment:

The authors investigated the method of electrochemical production of active chlorine for contaminant degradation. The mechanism is an anode oxidizing Cl- into active chlorine species. The authors used various approaches to optimize the system, and has done quite a lot of research. My concerns are mainly in the language of this manuscript, and also in the organizational structure.

1. a lot of grammar and typo erros appear in the manuscript. The authors need to polish this manuscript VERY hard！

2. In the manuscripts, the authors mentioned a lot of times supplementary tables and figures. But I couldn’t find attached document. 

3. the authors should re-organize their tables and figures. Parameter optimization process tables should be moved into the supplementary document, since they are not really important.

4. another thing that I don’t understand is, why after the mechanistic investigation, the authors probed the effect of ions and organics? Although they are relevant to practice, they are of minor importance to this study. This makes this work redundant.

Reviewer 2 Report

The submitted article presents an extensive study of the removal of fenobucarb from an aqueous environment in the presence of chloride ions which facilitate the process through the indirect oxidation route. 

The design of the experiments are quite extensive and the final results are quite compelling. However, in my opinion, at the present state, the article is ineligible for proper review and it requires extensive editing and improvement of the presentation of the results before it can be considered for publication. I base my decision on the following factors:

1) English needs a thorough revision. Some examples of the misuse of the language are shown in the attached document in "Introduction". The problems with English persist in the whole article but the reviewer chose not to include them so as to make the other comments more visible to the Editor and the Authors. In the present state, the reviewer could not understand what was meant by the Authors in many places in the text (some examples are highlighted in the document).

2) The Authors refer in the text to supplementary data in much too many instances. If the data you are referring to is so important, it would be wise to include it in the article. I had no opportunity to check if the claims are supported by the presented results simply because I had no access to them in the first place. Maybe it would also be wise to reconsider what is the main case to be presented here, because the amount of data presented is, in my opinion, too long for a single research paper.

3) The statistical analysis (including RSM) is presented in a very poor and fragmentary way. The final result is interesting but it is extremely difficult to follow because of the very poor English and lack of complete data to review.

Therefore, I recommend reconsidering the article for publication after a major revision and when the abovementioned criticism is duly addressed.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

This manuscript (Manuscript ID water-461294) reports mainly how the amount of active chlorine which is produced during the electrolysis of water, changes under different pH, current density, chloride concentration, and electrolyte flow rate. All of these parameters can clearly affect the formation of chlorine but the authors tried to measure the contribution of those parameters in active chlorine formation. However, these measurements are highly dependent to the electrode structure, I mean size of the electrodes (geometric surface area) and other intrinsic properties of the electrodes such as activity toward different electrochemical reactions, surface area, conductivity, etc. Thus, we cannot generalize the results of this work to other electrochemical setups. Moreover, it is very difficult to follow what the authors want to say in different sections, and it is not clear what the importance of the work is.  In contrast, there are a lot of ambiguous sentences, repetition, and non-useful information, which make the reading more difficult. The style of the manuscript mainly looks like a lab report rather than an article. Thus, I recommend rejecting this manuscript.