Fatigue Resistance Analysis of the Orthotropic Steel Deck with Arc-Shaped Stiffener

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

1) Please remove acronyms from the abstract.

2) Keywords should be more words than phrases, please provide them in alphabetic order.

3) Figure 1 should be provided with the scale.

4) Table 4. I don't think you should provide grammar articles (the) in the table.

5) Please follow the standard article structure: introduction, Materials and Methods, Results, Discussion, and Conclusions. The background should be in the introduction. Conclusions should be countable and relatively short. Comparative graphs with other works are suitable for Discussion.

6) Most of the references are outdated; please add more (about 30%) references related to the works published in 2019-2022.

7) Table 3 contains figures; normally, figures and tables should not be combined. 

8) Please add the formulated novelty of the work at the end of the introduction.

9) "generate different cyclic stress cycles. The stress amplitude is smaller than the limit" - how much exactly

10) "Furthermore, the welding process may cause the stress concentration and it will have seriously impact on fatigue life evaluation" - this conclusion is obvious and known as "the stiffener" and "the arc-shaped stiffener" effects.

11) How much can the life cycle of the bridge be improved with the applied measures?

12) Please add the practical significance of the research to the conclusions.

13) Please add the future outlook at the end of the conclusions.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Please see the comments and suggestions below for the improvement of the article:

1. English needs to be improved. Please revise the manuscript with the help of a native speaker or a professional, if possible. There are various mistakes that I cannot mention all here. Even in the abstract there are mistakes, such as: 

"Based on the Mingzhu Bay steel bridge, the proposed steel deck FE model were first established". since it is singular, it should be "was", not "were". Similar mistakes can be found throughout the text and need to be corrected

2. Please explain how this work is different from the published work "Fatigue Analysis of Long-Span Steel Truss Arched Bridge Part I: Experimental and Numerical Study of Orthotropic Steel Deck" in the same Metals, MDPI journal. The topic seems to be the same and many parts of the work seem to be very similar. Make sure that the similarity of the two works is not high using proper software such as iThenticate and others.

3. in figure 2 it is not easy to understand what the dimensions refer to. we see 60+3*96 and that appears to be the first 4 spans. the end line is not correct by the way, as it is to the right of the pier, not exactly on the pier. Then we have 96+164, etc , which is 6 terms. is this 6 spans? not easy to see. it would be better to write the distance under each span, instead of this which is confusing.

4. fig 4: add dimensions in mm or whatever. the unit is missing now. in the previous figure you have included it. the same for figure 6, also units are missing.

5. table 2: what does temperature refer to here? you mention mechanical properties of steel. yield strength is ok, tensile strength also, elongation also, but is temperature a mechanical property of a steel material? it does not make sense to me, I am not sure what this temperature refers to. please explain and discuss

6. section 4.2 about the loading: please mention the design code that you are using for this.

7. fig 7: units for stresses are missing here. please include them in the caption

8. in eq 1 and next, explain all variables that are present in the equations. for example variable m to start with, needs to be explained and described. similarly for all others.

9. what software do you use for the FEM analysis? give us some details about the model, such as software used, size of model in terms of nodes/elements, time to analyze etc

10. Other than the above points, the work is interesting and nicely written. the introduction part could have been enriched further with more literature review on the topic.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

The article is well written and well structured. It also includes valuable results. In general, I believe that this manuscript has a good potential to be published in the journal, but besides the following editorial points, the most important mental concern of the reviewer is only the validation of the finite element model used in this paper. How are you sure of the stress analysis results? Compare it with experimental data or discuss with the results of other articles.

1- add appropriate references to Tables 2 and 3. 

2- In Figure 4, add the dimension unit. 

3- Only the stress contours for M7 are shown in Figure 7. it is strongly suggested to add stress contours for all cases (M1-M7). In addition, you can add it in the appendix. 

4- On page 6 and line 137, it is stated that two concern points are considered for fatigue analysis and cycle counting. please show the location of these two points on the Figure and bridge model. In addition, explain how you chose these two points? what is your criterion to select these points? 

5- I believe that the von-Misses criteria is not appropriate to calculate equivalent stress because this situation is 3D and complicated stress tensor components. So, please address that this criteria is proper. 

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

1) Figure 1 should be provided with the scale.

2) I did not find the novelty of the work at the end of the introdution.

3) "can reduce the stress amplitude" - how much? please, add the value. 

4) I did not find the future outlook in the conclusions. 

Author Response

Thank you for your comments, please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

The authors did their best to provide revised manuscript according to the reviewers' comments and respond to them one by one. Of course, they have done this well and their answers are logical. Therefore, the article can be published in the Journal. However, regarding the reviewer's concern for the validation of the finite element model, it was only answered that it was done in ref No. 30 and this is not enough, but the general process of this validation should be stated as well as the error percentage of between the simulation results and fatigue tests. Therefore, it is strongly suggested to describe more about this issue (at least, one paragraph). 

Author Response

Thank you for your comments, please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf