Calculation of the Effects of Silver (Ag) Dopant on Radiation Shielding Efficiency of BiPbSrCaCuO Superconductor Ceramics Using EGS4 Code

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The submitted article “Calculation of the effects of Silver (Ag) dopant on radiation 1 shielding efficiency of BiPbSrCaCuO superconductor ceramics 2 using EGS4 code” is interesting and good article. This kind of few studies hence is very desire. In my opinion manuscript is written correctly, concisely in most parts (some mistakes) and remarks should be corrected before acceptance of publication). Below I pointed most of mistakes and matters for exploration.

1-     In Introduction I need recent articles with any information about priority of studies/Justification.

2-     In introduction the emphases should be placed on Justification.

3-     In Introduction, please include recent articles about application of Superconducting

Purposes.

4-     Summary-should include with points (most important issue).

 In my opinion this is good paper for Applied Sciences, I recommend minor revision.  

English language and Style are minor spill check required. 

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Thanks for writing this paper with so much background and introduction. Some comments:

1.  It's a 16 pages paper, such length will impede reader's patience to read through the paper and get full understanding of it. Too short is bad too, will make people who are not familiar with the field hard to get into it.  In my humble opinion, the introduction can be compressed, especially the applications and the significance of superconductivity. 

2. It's still not clear to me that how MAC is able to determine HVL, MFP, Zeff, RPE. Could you briefly explain their relationships

3. Is there any intuitive explanation that why silver increase contribute the decrease of MAC and MAC drop less for higher energies?

4. You used EGS4 and MAC to do Monte Carlo simulation, how do you explain the differences of the two? for example figure 7 and table 7

5.  Monte Carlo simulation is based on models, models are based on previous real  experiments, what you did is simply using the two MC softwares to calculate and reconfirm the characteristics of the materials, So what's really special about this paper? are you giving something others have not predicted or what? Is there any experiment in plan in the future?

I think the author need to be more rigorous on the writings.

for example, "It was used to determine some337

shielding parameters such as HVL, MFP, Zeff, RPE and kerma ( k  ) by using mass atten-uation coefficient values.", the "it" actually means mass atten-uation coefficient values, considering the previous sentence, this "by XXXX“ is very redundant. 

Author Response

Thank you for your review and comments.

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

The modification to the manuscript and the  response looks good to me. I'm okay with current version. Thanks for your effort.