Review Reports

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

I believe this paper is relevant to mineral processing and is innovative in the way it addresses the issue. However, I would suggest that they explain in the introduction why kerosene and 2-octanol were chosen, and delve deeper into the effect of pH on the behavior of the systems, since it is clearly an important variable. The methodology or experimental procedure should be modified to make the relationships clearer and to explain why these relationships were chosen rather than others. There are observations in the paper that should be taken into account.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Thank you for your consideration. Please kindly refer to the attached file for our detailed point-by-point responses to the reviewers' comments.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Review Comments

The manuscript entitled “New Insights into the Mechanism of Gangue Contamination in Coking Coal Flotation: Roles of Water Entrainment and Slime Coating” is interesting and reports the investigation of the contamination of various gangues, such as quartz, kaolinite, and calcite in coking coal flotation, with the use of flotation kinetics, bubble particle interaction tests, zeta potential analysis, etc.

The manuscript is well written and of high interest, containing new ideas, contributing to the body of knowledge and shall be useful to researchers as well as to the mining and mineral engineering industries. More so, the manuscript presentation reflects the present state of knowledge. Thus, I recommend publication of the manuscript upon these major revisions.

1. Abstract should be concise and also capture the key findings of the study as well as the implication. Authors should re-write the abstract in such a way that the aim, the key findings and implications of the study are to be fully captured in the body of the abstract.
2. The introduction should also be improved. It doesn’t contain enough background/motivation as it should. Also, the concluding paragraph in the introduction should explain exactly the aim/objective of the study as well as its contribution to the body of knowledge.
3. The Figure representing the SEM/EDS does not have a caption. A caption should be included to describe the Figure.
4. More so, it is advised that when carrying out SEM/EDS analysis, that multiple spectra should be observed on the mineral/material. This is to obtain accurate distribution of the mineral particles. Thus, authors should provide 2 or 3 different spectra on SEM/EDS analysis. This will improve the quality of the work.
5. Authors should properly label the microscopic graphs which include the SEM micrographs, showing the distribution of the various phases and complexes present. It is important that the readers are able to see what the authors are seeing in the micrographs and microstructural representations.
6. The discussion section is too shallow. Authors should provide more in-depth scientific discussion of the results.
7. The conclusion should be rewritten and restructured; there are a lot of long sentences that needs to be split into 2 or 3 sentences. Further, a conclusion representing some future prospectus related to the results in the present study should be given in a separate sub heading.

Author Response

Thank you for your consideration. Please kindly refer to the attached file for our detailed point-by-point responses to the reviewers' comments.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The manuscript addresses a topic of great importance; it is easy to read and provides information and insights that allow readers to understand and delve deeper into topics related to the one discussed in the manuscript. The authors took the reviewers’ suggestions into account and significantly improved the quality of the manuscript; therefore, I believe it should be considered for acceptance for publication.

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Okay