Cyclic and Permanent Shear Strains of a Soft Cohesive Soil Subjected to Combined Static and Cyclic Loading

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Manuscript presents cyclic and permanent shear strains of a soft cohesive soils subjected to combined static and cycling loading.

Interesting manuscript, well written, minor comments needs to be resolved.

Figure 1 is blurry. Appropriate aim and scope in Introduction would benefit manuscript. Could you put geological map within Figure 2 with borehole or available profile? It woudl benefit readers. Figure 3 larger. Bigger font. Table 1 is hard to read left column. Make it simpler. Can you present Figure 7 in simpler and more readier view? Font is too small. In general, for bullets, use alignment to the right. References are not written according to the MDPI style

Author Response

We are very grateful to the reviewer for the time spent on the paper and their valuable comments to improve it. All comments are very appropriate and the indicated modifications have been made.

Responses to comments are incorporated in the attached word file.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

This paper presents an empirical relation between cyclic shear strain and permanent shear strain of a cohesive soil; the relation was established through curve fitting of the data points obtained from laboratory cyclic simple shear tests.  The manuscript is lengthy and a little tedious, which need be reworked; for instance, Fig. 4 can be omitted, and conclusion can be condensed.  Additionally, words/sentences at many places shown below should be answered and corrected. 

Line 20:   ----the soil reaches the fault critically.  What does “fault” mean? Also, on Line 82.

Line 35:  -----in the preset paper---, should be “present” paper.

Line 37:  The deformations develop by a cohesive soil ---, replace “develop by” by “of”.

Line 39:  --- by monotonic single shear tests--, should be simple shear; also, on Line 117.

Line 98: ----that soft cohesive soil goes through---change to undergoes

Lines 145 & 153: ---deformations developed by a cohesive--- change to “of”

Line 189 & 192: ---the drawers of the Prat dock--, what does “drawer” mean?

Line 258:  5.3.1.2. Cuantitative evaluation, an incorrect word and shouldn’t it be Qualitative evaluation?

Line 281:  Letters and figures in Fig. 7 are too small to show the test results clearly.

Line 305 & 307:  Explain what are biased and unbiased tests.

Lines 329 & 334:  ---potential function type---, shouldn’t it be exponential function?

Line 369:  ---was classifies as---, should be classified—

Line 372:  ---clayed silt--, should be clayey---.

Line 381:  --dynamic solicitation.  What does it mean?

Line 384:  ---cyclic solicitation---.  What is it?

Line 402:  It is questionable whether the presented empirical relations are valid for other types of soils.

The above listed suggestions are only what I have spotted; there must be others which require a more careful review.  Additionally, the numbering of pages discontinues from p. 10.

Author Response

We are very grateful to the reviewer for the time spent on the paper and their valuable comments to improve it. All comments are very appropriate and the indicated modifications have been made.

Responses to comments are incorporated in the attached word file.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report

This is a rather nicely written technical report on quite a large number of cyclic simple shear experiment on a soft cohesive soil. The experimental structure is sound and the results are reasonable. In terms of scentific interest to the readers, I have contrasting feelings: on the one hand, it is a relevant addition of experimental results to the literature, on the other hand, the results are not framed or discussed in a broader context. This is well acknowledged by the authors, who deliberately did not provide the "full picture" of the behaviour or the studied material, which would have included monotonic and triaxial compressional/extensional tests. Also, the authors stated that their conclusions are only applicable to the very specific case study and did not attempt any generalisation by contextualising their work within the existing literature. In my opinion, to be acceptable as a scientific paper (and not a mere engineering report), the authors should either provide, as per above, the "full picture" on the characterisation of the studied soil, or exploring the validity (and thus practical significance) of their results by contextualising them.

Author Response

We are very grateful to the reviewer for the time spent on the paper and their valuable comments to improve it.

Responses to comments are incorporated in the attached word file.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

Line 19:  Article “the” in front of “failure” is not needed.  Also, check several other places.

Line 20:  Replace “empirical functions” by “empirical relations”.

Line 28:  “subject to” should be “subjected to”.

Lines 45~47:  Missing Greek symbols here and many other places. 

Lines 113~115:  ---use “the behavior of cohesive soils subjected to --- was studied”.

Lines 116~121:  Rewrite to make it more understandable. 

Line 124:  “The deposit of samples” --- use “The test samples were extracted”.

Line 189:  Table 1 needs Greek symbols.  Also, check lines 191 to 227.

Line 260~262:  Split this long sentence into two.  Also, between 30 and 53 m. below sea level?

Line 280:  Fig. 5 shows---.

Line 293:  strain ( ) is shown---.

Line 462:  results of the sedimentation tests, ---what are they?

Line 485:  types of soil, the exposed methodology ---.  Do you mean the proposed methodology?

I strongly recommend that the manuscript be carefully reviewed and edited.

Author Response

We are very grateful to the reviewer for the time spent on the paper and their valuable comments to improve it.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report

Overall, I think this manuscript can be published as is.

It would be great if the authors could upload the results of their experiment in digital form (spreadsheet or similar) on an open repository (e.g. Zenodo) and link it to the paper. This would make their work more interesting to researchers who could use the authors' results to calibrate/test their numerical models.

In any case, I think a data availability statement should be added to the paper.

Author Response

Thanks you very much!. Of course, with the permission of the funding entities, all data are available to the research community.