Flame-Retardant and Tensile Properties of Polyamide 12 Processed by Selective Laser Sintering

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Recommendation: Major revisions.

 

Comments: The authors reported an additive manufacturing of polyamide-12 using SLS. The work is interesting; however, there are a few issues that should be addressed before considering for publication. I hope the authors can reflect from the comments and improve the manuscript.

 

1)     The authors report a SLS polyamide, though SLS has already been reported for manufacturing polyamide-12 (Salazar, A., et al. "Fatigue crack growth of SLS polyamide 12: Effect of reinforcement and temperature." Composites Part B: Engineering 59 (2014): 285-292.; Batistella, Marcos, et al. "Selective laser sintering of polyamide 12/flame retardant compositions." Polymer Degradation and Stability 181 (2020): 109318.). Can the author provide a table summarizing the novelty of this work by comparing it with the literature?

 

2)     The flame-retardant properties of a polymer is highly dependent on the experimental conditions. Please provide a full list of testing conditions for the sake of repeatability.

 

3)     It is interesting to see the mechanical strength is sort of homogeneous, as claimed by the authors. It is not uncommon that the strength in z direction is inferior than xy direction. Can the authors provide detailed reasoning and also compare the results with the literature?

 

4)     The SEM results are not readable. Please add a clearer scale bar.

 

 

 

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

The manuscript titled "Flame-retardant and tensile properties of the polyamide-12 processed by selective laser sintering”  (jcs-1778930) describes the study of the influence of printing parameters on flame retardancy and tensile properties. Herein, the authors use SLS to produce polyamide-12 based samples for further application in aviation. The authors highlight the advantages of Additive Manufacturing (AM) concerning the amount of raw material use, precision and accuracy, geometry freedom and processing time. In my opinion, studies like the present one are of huge interest for the implementation of new technologies to improve equipment while being a step further towards sustainability. The introduction section clearly states the necessity in changing the way aircraft components are made and the benefits that come from  the use of lighter materials. In addition, the experiment design is well explained and is in line with the final application. The results are clearly presented which makes the manuscript quite easy to understand and pleasant for the reader. I would like to highlight figures 2 and 3, which, in my opinion, are extremely important for the understanding of the manuscript. Nonetheless, the scale bar in figure 6 is quite difficult to read, so, for this reason, I ask the authors to revise it. Indeed, I think that the SEM section is the poorest of the manuscript. The manuscript would strongly benefit from a revision in this part. Also, I think that the contrast of figure 6 should be improved, maybe using another color filter. Overall, the writing across the entire manuscript is poor and would strongly benefit from a revision. I strongly recommend having a 3rd party (English native) read and edit the manuscript. For those reasons, I would reconsider its publication in " J. Compos. Sci." after minor revisions. 

Author Response

Please see the attachement.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Accept as it is in the present version.