Fire Parameters of Spruce (Picea abies Karst. (L.)) Dust Layer from Different Wood Technologies Slovak Case Study

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Review report _ Applied Sciences _ Fire parameters of spruce _ dust layer from different wood processing / cutting technologies. Slovak Case Study

General comments

The researchers have visited a woodworking factory and sampled dust from the sawing line, from grinding machinery, from a briquette production line and from a dust filter, called extraction device in the further analysis. Which equipment did the suction pipe extract dust from? Was it from several different processes (and thus represents and average of particle sizes which different cutting processes produce) or from one (in this case it should be mentioned which one)? Anyhow, extracting the dust is not changing its particle sizes, and I need further clarifications on why this is included as a fourth sample category.

Determining the distribution of the size of particles in the dust, according to the way the wood was treated is valuable, as presented in Table 2 and Figure 5.

On the contrary, I do not believe that the study of differences in moisture among the dust samples in connection to the way the dust was produced has scientific value. The wood may contain different amount of moisture, according to its location in the tree-trunk. When cut, the particles adjust to the Relative Humidity of ambient atmosphere, which in this case we know nothing about. It is more the time that passed since cutting, and the period the dust was lying on the equipment before sample collection that may determine the moisture in the dust, rather than the cutting procedure. In Table 3, the largest grains contained lower moisture (%), perhaps because they were newly cut, and the relative humidity that day was low. The extracted dust (ExtrD) contained most, perhaps because it has been stored in a filter for several days and attracted moisture from the atmosphere. I suggest Figure 4 and all associated discussion to be removed.

However, the researchers have dried the dusts according to a standard, before determining the ignition temperature and time to ignition. Thus, this part of the results is valuable. How many tries were run on each type of sample? How was the smoke removed from the laboratory?

A major revision, also a conceptual one, will be necessary before reconsidering the manuscript for publication in Applied Sciences. If the results are the particle size distribution in the dust, according to the way the wood was treated (sawing, grinding, pelleting) and the ignition temperature and time to ignition of the samples after drying, the contribution may also be considered as a technical note.

Detailed comments

1. Please use “ignition” instead of “initiation” throughout the article.
2. Introduction: lines 30 to 33 can be removed (too general and the explosion aspect is not part of the article).
3. Line 44: greater that what?
4. Line 62: consider changing the word “technology” to “equipment”
5. Line 176: what do you mean with “adequate”?
6. Line 237 (Figure 6) and Table 6: please harmonise the times. WD_ExtrD ignited after 11 min (Table 6) but we see glowing material after 7 min on Figure 6.
7. Figure 7: Too small numbers in the axes. Please include units in the X-axis (minutes?)

Author Response

Our comments are in Attached File.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

I would like to thank you for your work. At the beginning I would like to recommend reconstruct this paper a little bit. A main problem for my was understanding of main goal of this paper. Acc. to abstract a main goal is focus on "monitor the minimum initiation temperature ....".
Acc. to description in lines 74-82 a main goal of this work was focused on "particle size distribution ...." and its statistical analysis. Monitoring the minimum initiation temperature..." was shown as additional aim.

Text include a lot of non precise sentences, and errors eg.
Abstract
line 13 - an actual topic not a actual topic
line 19 - 21 - I do not understand information about "fraction 63 250µm"

Introduction should be improved
lines 33-44 - this acapit consist a lot of information which do not correspond each other. In one sentece you shown information about technology, next sentence presented information about hazard agains human, and than you described burning/explosive problem. 

Materials and methods
line 84 - subtitle should be :Materials"; not "Samples of spruce wood dust (Picea abies Karst. (L.))"
line 85-92 - this text shoul be add into the introduction. It is a port of beckgroun why you want to work with spruce dust. In my opinion one sentence about spruce will be enought e.g. The object of the research is spruce wood dust (Picea abies Karst. (L.)) which is a waste product of the processing of common spruce in a wood processing plant

line 94-96 "At the same time, carving experts consider spruce, in terms of the impact of wood dust on the human body, to be weak compared to other woody plants [43]." 
Above sentence is introduction, not materials description.

Sentences in line 111-116 should be deleted. This description is really complicatng and hard to understand. My proposal of this text is just "The methodical procedure of preparation of representative samples is in Table 1".
Table 1 have to be improved. This table in my oppinion do not present procedure of samples preparation. Moreover in a text in table, acronyms which are use as a samples ID. I would like to ask you to feature of this acronims. At the moment the acronymes are hide in a text.

line 121-122 - this is introduction, not methodhology.

line 169; I do not understand how "The color fields in Table 2 present the individual analyzed fractions of the samples."
line 172 - 182. Desription of figure 3 is corresponding with  ISO 9276-1. I can not find this standard in methodhology description. It will be hard to understand for not-experts if you present results as "Continuous Cumulative Curve" without extra explanation.

line 188-197 I am lost. Which data come from literature and should be added to intro part, and which data come from your experiment?

Figure 7 have to be improved. No horizontal line description. No legend which explain differences colours which can be observed on graphs.

Author Response

Reviewer 2 - answer

I would like to thank for very important comments for our article, which bring better quality this article. All comments are incorporated in the manuscript and highlighted in green.

Our comments are below.

Lines 74-82

we repaired aim.

lines 13, 19 - 21

Sorry, we repaired them.

lines 33-44

Sorry, this information has been summarized because the topic is rich and published by a large number of authors. Information on wood dust explosions was selected from the text.

line 84 - yes, we repaired it.

line 85-92, line 94-96 – we changed it.

111-116, yes, we repaired it and added "The methodical procedure of preparation of representative samples is in Table 1".

Table 1 We repaired it.

line 169; We added comment.

line 172 – 182: We added it to methodology.

line 188-197: We corrected it.

Figure 7 have to be improved. Sorry, we repaired it.

Reviewer 3 Report

The article presents a new approach to the problem of wood dust testing, focused on the origin of dust depending on the processing process carried out.

After this sentence, the authors should also add that wood and wood-based wastes are also subject to the processes of reducing the size of the wood, e.g. chipping, etc.

"In the woodworking industry, the processes of sawing, planning, milling, grinding, trimming and other processing of wood mass or wood-based materials are applied Sydor et al." Production residues are also subject to processes related to the reduction of the size of the wood, contributing to the formation of undesirable dust fractions. [https://doi.org/10.1016/j.renene.2021.09.039, https://doi.org/10.1093/annhyg/mes112].

In the discussion, the authors may refer to the results of research, which also concerned, among others, spruce dust:

file:///C:/Users/Halina/AppData/Local/Temp/wargula_kaczmarczyk_dziechciarz_assessment_1_2019-2.pdf

In the conclusion, the authors should respond to the purpose of the work.

Authors cite quite a lot of their own works, authors should check whether the share of their works is not greater than 10%.

The methodology is well described.

The results of the experiment appear to be reliable.

The discussion should refer to more research by other scientists.

The charts come in different styles, have gaps in the description and are inconsistent with the form.

Fig. 7, 5, 4. No description of the horizontal axis.

Author Response

I would like to thank for very important comments for our article, which bring better quality this article. All comments are incorporated in the manuscript and highlighted in blue.

Sorry, we could not find this file:

file:///C:/Users/Halina/AppData/Local/Temp/wargula_kaczmarczyk_dziechciarz_assessment_1_2019-2.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

Dear authors,

thank you a lot for your work. I have just few comments about a new version of paper.
If you add axis description into the graph please do nto repead the same information in figure description.
Corrected aim is more precise but corelation between aim of the work and cocnlusions should be more emphasise.

Author Response

Thanks to the opponent for comments. Thanks to his last comment, we also made adjustments to the Results and supplemented the conclusions. Changes are highlighted in yellow.

Reviewer 3 Report

The authors did not take into account all changes in the text.

In response, they did not comment in detail on why they had not done so.

Apart from other remarks to which the authors have not raised. I answer, no access to a very similar article, you can find it on Google Scholar under the title "The assessment of fire risk of non-road mobile wood chopping machines". 

Author Response

Thanks to the opponent for the article. We found the article on the: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/333557789_THE_ASSESSMENT_OF_FIRE_RISK_OF_NON-ROAD_MOBILE_WOOD_CHOPPING_MACHINES?fbclid=IwAR2DAiuAlPqYIXHVAW7fyO_vo4q2yQNlZz9o5OI4f8rWL4hfI9eGZCD81ME

Thanks to the study of this article, we have gained new ideas on how to evaluate. Thank you for it. At the same time, we present it in our article as a relevant response for the study of fire risk) in the process of heat exchange convection on shredded plant material.

These are the following sources:

Warguła, Ł.;  Dziechciarz, A.;  Kaczmarzyk, P. The assessment of fire risk of non-road mobile wood chopping machines. Journal of Research and Applications in Agricultural Engineering” 2019, 64, 1, 58-64.

Kaczmarzyk P., Małozięć D., Warguła Ł.: Research on electrical wiring used in the construction of working machines and vehicles in the aspect of fire protection. Journal of Mechanical and Transport Engineering, 2018, 70, 3, 13-24.

In the manuscript, changes and additions are highlighted in yellow.

Round 3

Reviewer 3 Report

This is a good and interesting article. It shows a new approach to an already quite recognized topic.