Nitridation Reaction of Titanium Powders by 2.45 GHz Multimode Microwave Irradiation using a SiC Susceptor in Atmospheric Conditions
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Additional comments for authors
Major comments: I have no major comments and or issues for this manuscript.
Minor comments:
Authors did not present a clear cut mechanism how conventional furnace heating of Tin powder renders only tin oxide instead of TiN, whereas microwave heating provides predominantly TiN. A simple reason mentioned in the manuscript is internal heating, there may be more than internal heating, forces such as vibrational forces of reactant and substrate may also involved during the microwave irradiation reaction.
As reader, it is not clear for me all the tin powder first converted to tin oxide then reduced to TiN or some tin powder oxidised to tin oxide and some directly transformed to TiN.
Authors might have included another sample in the current investigation to observe reduction of tin oxide then that transformed to TiN under the same atmospheric conditions.
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
This manuscript, entitled 'Nitridation reaction of titanium powders by 2.45 GHz multimode microwave irradiation using a SiC susceptor in atmospheric conditions,' is considered to be relevant to the scope of this journal. Before this manuscript is acceptable for publication, some issues have to be addressed.
In 'Materials and methods', the statistical methods applied for data analysis are not described. From the results of this study, some correlation tests were used. The 'Materials and methods' section should describe which statistical methods were used and what was the level of significance in this study.
In 'Figure 3', the photos are considered to have different magnifications. Please, re-prepare or re-make this figure with the consistent size, magnification and identical backgrounds. The scale bars, if necessary, are also recommended.
Figure 5 and Table 1 are recommended to be merged. Also, please re-arrange the graphs, legends, and letters for clarity. Some overlapped areas are found. In addition, please, provide the R2 values.
Please, re-make 'Figure 6'. There is an area where the letters are unrecognizable.
What the reviewer would like to ask the authors is what was the sample size for each condition. For example, what was the sample size for the condition of 1 minute and 800 degrees Celcius? If the sample size was one, it would be too small. At least, why such a small sample size was used should be described in 'Discussion'.
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 3 Report
The article entitled “Nitridation Reaction of Titanium Powders by 2.45 GHz Multimode Microwave Irradiation using a SiC Susceptor in Atmospheric Conditions" has been carefully reviewed. This is a good attempt towards the use of an inert melting method to quantify the
amount of nitrogen and oxygen in reacted TiN powder to understand the detailed nitridation mechanism.
The introduction section could have newer references.
The materials and methods section should be divided into subsections. From line 59 to 68 is the description of the process and from line 68 is methodology, which should be more visible.
The lines 69-70 and 70-71 has the same sense, please correct it.
How many production processes were done?
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 4 Report
A good synthesis of the literature offering an overview of the evolution researches in the area.
A work of high scientific level which can be published in its current form!
Author Response
Thank you very much and the authors sincerely appreciate the Reviewer’s careful reading of our manuscript.
