Wear Resistance of Electrodeposited Ni–Mn–SiC Composite Coatings

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

In this paper, the wear resistance of electrodeposited Ni-Mn-SiC composite coatings deposited onto S45C steel was investigated. It can be concluded that the needs to go through major revision in order to be accepted for publication in Coatings. The reasons are mainly threefold:

1. An abstract should provide some values which were obtained in the research – …hardness, roughness, residual stress, grain size, etc. were increased from X to Y, or by X%.
2. The abstract should be a concise summary of what was done and what results were obtained. It is recommended that the English needs to be corrected by either a native English speaking colleague, or a professional service.
3. The paper did not provide sufficient background information for the readers to understand the specific cause and effects and it is too short to grasp good points. For example, the authors stated that “the single metal coatings have been unable to meet the needs of industrial production”, but it is necessary to cite an example with some related references.
4. Introduction: p. 37 cam --> can
5. Please rewrite the introduction by providing more specific information - it should provide some values which were obtained from the previously conducted researches.
6. This is an interesting paper, but it is always necessary, in my opinion, to cross-check innovative results with state of the art. My advice is to spend a bit of time to cross-check with standard state-of-the-art of S45C steel surface coating.
7. When the concentration of sodium citrate reaches 40 g/L and more, the micro-cracks are appeared on the surface. So it means that the coatings in Figs. 1(c-e) cannot be used in the mentioned industries due to the presence of micro-cracks. Why did the authors evaluate the wear resistance and other properties of those coatings?
8. Specifically, the authors need to discuss the influence of sodium citrate and SiC particle concentrations on the increase or decrease of micro-hardness and wear resistance mechanisms.
9. The authors need to add the surface roughness data of the coatings and to discuss the effect of surface roughness on wear resistance.
10. It is necessary to characterize the grain size of each coatings by SEM or TEM.
11. It is better to provide a cross-sectional wear track profile of each coating after wear tests (Fig. 5 and Fig. 10) because it is hard to see the difference in wear track dimensions through 3D images.
12. All the results such as morphology, hardness, grain size and wear resistance of the coatings are poorly discussed with lack of scientific aspect.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Attached file

Comments for author File: Comments.doc

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

No further comments.

Author Response

Thank you again for all your helpful comments and suggestions.

Reviewer 2 Report

The article has been significantly improved basically with the addition of sic particles on coating and its wear test. the most interesting part of the investigation is examination of the interface region. However authors need to address some similar research in this areas such as

 

1. Study of Interfacial Adhesion between Nickel-Titanium Shape Memory Alloy and a Polymer Matrix by Laser Surface Pattern

S Samal, O Tyc, L Heller, P Šittner, M Malik, P Poddar, M Catauro, ... Applied Sciences 10 (6), 2172, 2020   2. Effect of shape and size of filler particle on the aggregation and sedimentation behavior of the polymer composite   Powder Technology, 2020 3. Bimodal distribution of filler on viscosity and thermal expansion of glass composites Ceramics International 39 (2), 1659-1666, 2013

Author Response

We read and add the literature you provided on interface region research related areas. Thank you again for all your helpful comments and suggestions.