Recovery and Use of Recycled Carbon Fibers from Composites Based on Phenol-Formaldehyde Resins

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The paper must be improved. Please, see the attached requests.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Thank you so much for reviewing our paper. Your comments are very conceptual, and they provide a foundation for further thinking and development of our research in the future. On your advice, we proofread the article one more time and expanded the list of references. Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

This is an interesting and timely work about the solvolysis reclamation of carbon fibres form phenol-formaldehyde resins and their remanufacturing into concrete or new composites panels. The information provided are novel and relevant, and I am particularly happy in reading that also Russian colleagues are working on this topic. However, I think that this paper will need minor edits and corrections before it can be published.

Please review grammar and spelling as there are a few imprecisions.

I think that you incorrectly refer to the “matrix” as the “binder”.

Introduction.

I think you forgot to delete some “working notes” between line 83 and 91. ?

Overall it contains all the required information; however, particularly after line 107, the introduction section is a bit fragmented and some statement are a repetition of what said above. Please streamline it a little bit.

Materials

I would present the material properties / characteristics into a table rather than a list.

Extraction of Fibres

Some information necessary for reproducibility are missing, e.g. in what format were the composites fed to the reactor.

Result of using secondary fibres for reinforcing fine-grained concrete

I would suggest to present the data in Table 3 in one or more bar charts, as they would be more immediate to read.

Results of secondary fibre use for composite materials production

You need to explain what is the fibre orientation in the laminate.

Also I would present Table 4 as one or more bar charts. Fmax is not needed.

Figure 7, Strain needs a unit of measurement, e.g. %. I would also comment on the shape of the stress strain curves with that long pseudo-plateau.

Discussion

Please add error/uncertainty in Figure 8.

I would suggest to put the various section of the discussions below the relevant section in the “Results” section, creating a “Results and discussion” section where results are presented and discussed at once and together in the various subsections.

I would then do a “Conclusions and future works” where the relevance of this work in the wide context (research and industry) is discussed, and how to move forward is suggested.

Author Response

Thank you very much for your attention to our article. We really appreciate the tremendous work you have done in evaluating and correcting the text. We accept all your comments and suggestions and it really improved the quality of our paper.  Please see the attachment.

Best regards

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

The authors have revised the paper as suggested.

The paper can be accepted.