Review Reports

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The use of non-destructive and high-performance techniques for quality control in road construction is always an excellent tool that deserves to be investigated. For this reason, I believe that the article is of interest from the point of view of both research and technology transfer.

I find it a little difficult to understand some of the explanations, which I will indicate below:

In section 3 on the determination of the dielectric constant, when the authors mention porosity, I understand that they are referring to the void content of the asphalt layer, is this correct? If not, please indicate how the porosity is determined.

Lines 153-154: Below figure 5, the authors comment that "a test section that was 5 m in length and 1.5 m in width was designed in front of the test section". Does this mean that there were 2 test sections? What type of asphalt mix was in the section? The porosity values seen in figures 7, 8 and 9 have a very wide variation: What type of asphalt layer was in the section used to determine the dielectric constant? Did it vary from 3% to more than 10%, or were there several asphalts with different porosities in the section?

Line 284: the authors indicate that "there were five measurement lanes and 21 channels per channel". Is this correct, or should it say 21 channels per lane?

Lines 291-292: what do the authors mean when they say "local heavy segregation"? I find it difficult to understand this expression, although I suppose they are referring to a granulometric segregation of the aggregates of the asphalt mix due to a bad execution of the paver, although they could also refer to a thermal segregation.

Lines 295-297: Where does the value of 6.5% come from, is it a value for the maximum permissible voids content for the asphalt mix indicated in the technical specifications?

Section 4.3. There are many area divisions in the test section and it is rather confusing to read the first paragraph.

Lines 316-319: What is the “middle surface layer”? The segregation commented took place in the surface layer but the analysis was carried out on the intermediate layer, is this right?

Figure 12: what is the parameter plotted in the vertical axis? If this axis is the “Proportion of local severe segregation”, how was this parameter calculated? It would be advisable to explain it previously.

Author Response

Please see the attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

This is an interesting study. However, the paper should be further improved based on the comments/suggestions below:

1. Referring to the abstract, authors should specify what is the most significant finding from the study and recommendations from the current findings 
2. In line 34, the authors specified, "looseness, flooding oil". are they referring to "raveling and bleeding"?. If yes, please avoid direct translation. Should carefully check the accurate terms to use.
3. Line 73, authors should not begin any sentence with an abbreviation or a number, it should be "The" GPR uses ............. 
4. Please rewrite the paragraph within lines 72 - 82
5. Please check the caption for Figure 3. Does it the "calibration mode"? or It is a sampling approach.

Author Response

Please see the attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf