Microstructural Characterization of a Single Crystal Copper Rod Using Monochromatic Neutron Radiography Scan and Tomography: A Test Experiment

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This paper reports the analysis of a single crystal copper rod by using monochromatic neutron radiography and tomography. The aim is the characterization of the microstructural features related to the homogeneity of the single crystal growth and the presence, shape and extension of spatially distributed misaligned grains or areas. As a result, the authors found differently oriented single crystal areas near the outer surface of the rod, and identified the most part of the rod volume as a unique single crystal. It is very interesting result, and can be investigated owing to high spatial resolution monochromatic neutron tomography. Thus, the reviewer considered this paper should be published in the special issue “Advances in Neutron Imaging” in the journal Applied Sciences. On the other hand, I feel some minor revisions are necessary before the publication. I describe some comments as follows.

-----

2. Method
Line 75

You mentioned Bragg dip here. I think some references are necessary for showing previous works. The candidates are:
J. R. Santisteban, J. Appl. Cryst. 38 (2005) 934-944.
F. Malamud and J. R. Santisteban, J. Appl. Cryst. 49 (2016) 348-365.
H. Sato, Y. Shiota, S. Morooka, Y. Todaka, N. Adachi, S. Sadamatsu, K. Oikawa, M. Harada, S. Zhang, Y. Su, T. Kamiyama, M. Ohnuma, M. Furusaka, T. Shinohara and Y. Kiyanagi, J. Appl. Cryst. 50 (2017) 1601-1610.
Joel Strickland, Karl Tassenberg, Gareth Sheppard, Bogdan Nenchev, Sam Perry, Jun Li, Hongbiao Dong, Genoveva Burca, Joe Kelleher and Steve Irwin, Scientific Reports 10 (2020) 20751.
Yosuke Sakurai, Hirotaka Sato, Nozomu Adachi, Satoshi Morooka, Yoshikazu Todaka and Takashi Kamiyama, Appl. Sci. 11 (2021) 5219.

-----

5. Results
Lines 170-172
Figure 1
Figure 3

Please define the coordinates (x,y) in Figures 1 and 3. This is because I cannot understand what is the horizontal axis of Figure 3.

Author Response

We wish to thank the reviewer for the suggestions. We added the references as suggested and we modified the text and figures to improve their clarity.

Reviewer 2 Report

See attached file.

Comments for author File: Comments.docx

Author Response

We are extremely indepted with the reviewer for the very useful suggestions to improve the quality of our work. we did all the modification suggested by changing text and figures. We also canceled figure n.4 since it was definitely not necessary once modified figure 1.

We think the text is much better now.

Thank you.