The Scratch Resistance of a Plasma-Assisted DUPLEX-Treated 17-4 Precipitation-Hardened Stainless Steel Additively Manufactured by Laser Powder Bed Fusion

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Review on the manuscript no coatings-2953970

Please find the comments below:

1. Page 3, Line 126/127 – how AM process parameters were defined? Were they optimized?

2. Table 1 – please make sure that the sum of elements for each material is giving 100% in total

3. Figure 4d – how the nitrogen content was measured? It is widely known that SEM/EDS technique is not precise in terms of the identification of light elements like oxygen, nitrogen, etc. Please discuss.

4. Scratch tests: it would be beneficial to present the results for at least 3 tests for each material condition. For such a purpose, statistical analysis would be helpful in the assessment of coating uniformity and further confirm whether the coating/heat treatment process parameters were successfully defined.

Overall, the manuscript is well written. High-quality results were clearly presented and discussed based on the available literature. The statistical analysis would be however beneficial to increase the quality of the paper. Otherwise, the results are based on one particular test and thus could not be reliable.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

In this paper, the authors analyzed the scratch resistance of a plasma-assisted DUPLEX treated 17-4 PH 2 stainless steel additively manufactured by laser powder bed fusion. It is suggested that the microstructure and phase formation at the interface of the coating and the base material were furtherly analyzed. 

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf