Review Reports

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The paper is aimed at experimentally investigating the unconstrained compressive strength and its relation with the related microstructure of calcareous sand with curing agent, the latter made of a variety of components including ordinary portland cement, lime (CaO), sodium sulfonate and acrylamide, a.o.

The work tackles an interesting topic, it was nicely structured and almost well organized and it is suitable for the Section Ocean Engineering (Journal of Marine Science and Engineering).

In the Reviewer's opinion the following recommendations/clarifications should be considered:

In section 1, after the State of the Art, the Authors should better clarify what are the key novelties of this paper and the main contributions of this work beyond the current SoA. They are missing or not deeply reported. The authors should declare how many specimens per conservation time and content of curing agent were tested. Only one? To check the quality of the specimen preparation, curing accuracy and quality of the testing procedure more than one repetition should be considered for conservation time/curing agent content. Please also add a Table which show an overview of the experimental programme. Are Figures 3 and 4 really necessary? I would suggest to remove them. If the authors considered more than 1 repetition (test type/conditioning/curing), thery should show the scatter of the results: i.e. through error bars (in Fig. 5 for example) and with min/max values in the tables. Is the procedure to analyze the image analysis in Section 3.2 a common way to do or it proposed by the authors? The Reviewer is referring to the analyses made between Eqs. 1-2-3-4-5. Please explain better or put some references. Section 4 is extremely interesting and brings outstanding outputs in this paper. However the author should better describe if the experimental results were affected by a scatter of the experimental procedure. Future developments which will follow to this research paper are missed or should be reported at the end of the concluding section.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Writing standard is very poor and needs to be substantially improved. There are many paragraphs which are repetitive, there is no need of repeating the same phrases again and again. The Abstract of the article is well written, the Introduction is okay but from topic #2 (Materials and Methods) onwards till Conclusion, it is poorly written. Therefore it must be re-written and upgraded for the paper to be published. I have already done extensive corrections in the draft of the paper attached here, make those correction first. I suggest, after paper has been re-written and upgraded and before submission to the Editors, it is better to get it checked from native English teacher or student.  

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Point 1: Writing standard is very poor and needs to be substantially improved. There are many paragraphs which are repetitive, there is no need of repeating the same phrases again and again. The Abstract of the article is well written, the Introduction is okay but from topic #2 (Materials and Methods) onwards till Conclusion, it is poorly written. Therefore it must be re-written and upgraded for the paper to be published. I have already done extensive corrections in the draft of the paper attached here, make those correction first. I suggest, after paper has been re-written and upgraded and before submission to the Editors, it is better to get it checked from native English teacher or student. 


 

Response 1: We have studied the valuable study, and tried our best to revise the manuscript. We thank you very much for doing extensive corrections in the draft of the paper. We have made those corrections first. In addition, we have carefully revised other parts of the manuscript, and also have re-scrutinized to improve the English by a language polishing service

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

The paper can be now accepted.

Author Response

Thank you very much for agreeing to accept our manuscript.

Reviewer 2 Report

The paper still needs moderate changes and corrections in the manuscript. The authors need to mention the Standard numbers for the tests they have conducted for example Chinese Standards, ASTM Standards, British Standards or Australian Standards for Compaction Test, making moulds of specimen, Compressive Strength Tests.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf