Process Control Methods in Cold Wire Gas Metal Arc Additive Manufacturing

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The topic of the work is quite important and relevant. The work is devoted to additive technologies of arc surfacing. There are a few notes about the work.

1. The introductory part is rather short. It would be nice to describe in more detail the work of other authors on this topic. Moreover, at the present time there are a lot of works in this area. Describe the pros and cons of analogues.

2. The methodology section is structured and written quite well. Explain in the article whether the composition of the electrodes in Table 1 was taken from the reference book or determined by yourself. If yourself, then write the technique and equipment.

Section 3.1.1. you provide a lot of information. But the discussion of these data is very superficial. You should expand it. In particular, describe the behavior of the curves in Figure 7a. Describe why your changes occur when the energy exceeds 350J/mm. And up to this value, other parameters hardly change, although the penetration depth decreases.

3. Similarly for Figure 9b. Your energy increases, while the reinforcement area remains almost unchanged. It would be interesting to touch on this issue in the description.

4. You change the speed of the electrode and change the amount of energy supplied. In this case, you study mainly the quality of the surface. But the structure will also change. You show on the charts that your HAZ zone is changing. This will change the properties of the printed blank. This is an extremely important question, how the properties and structure will change when the supplied energy changes. In your article, this issue is almost not considered. Are there plans to work in this direction? It would be good to describe this in the article, what is planned to be done and why these studies are not particularly important for this article.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

The study submitted for evaluation, entitled Process Control Methods in Cold Wire Gas Metal Arc Additive Manufacturing, describes a study of a state-of-the-art additive manufacturing method using the WAAM technique.

The presented research concept deals with two process control methods for additive manufacturing using electric arc and cold wire.

The realised scope of the research and the detailed description of the mechanisms and processes occurring during the process enabled the analysis to be carried out and correct conclusions to be drawn. The work can be very helpful for the development of further scopes of research (for geometrically complex components) and for the development of manufacturing processes using the WAAM technique.

I rate the presented study highly.

The following elements require correction:

the statement in line 81-82: "The shielding gas was the BOC SpecShield gas with 8% CO2 in Ar. A regulator controlled the gas flow and kept it at 18 to 20 m min-1" The gas flow is not specified in m min-1 but in litres.

Photograph of the demonstrator Figure 11 - should show the test piece in its entirety and separate enlarged photographs should be included of individual areas.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

Dear Authors,

The paper explains Process Control Methods in Cold Wire Gas Metal Arc Additive Manufacturing, which looks interesting; however following considerations should take into place to fit the journal criteria:

1) More relevant recent findings are available and should be cited in the introduction.

2) Work envelope of the GMA power source looks fine; however, I wonder if the authors check the other ones.

3) Effect of the travel speed control method was investigated; however, there are some strange tracks on the graphs which are not well explained.

4) The same applied to the Effect of the travel speed control method; please add more explanation.

 

No issue

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

The authors finalized the article and responded to all my comments. The article can be published in my opinion.