Experimental and Theoretical Analysis of the Smoke Layer Height in the Engine Room under the Forced Air Condition
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
1. The introduction needs to supplement the references in recent years
2. It is recommended to combine Figure 1 and Figure 2 for display
3. The title of Figure 6 is incorrect
4. It is suggested to rearrange the chapters of the paper, first give the modeling process of the theoretical model, then give the experimental process and results, and finally use the experimental results to verify the accuracy of the theoretical model.
Author Response
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Reviewer 2 Report
Comments:
An article has been prepared by the authors entitled as ‘Experimental and theoretical analysis of the smoke layer height in the engine room under the forced air condition’ where they have tried to compile the relevant information in this article, and however, this article is NOT a well-organized scientific article. Eventually, it suffers from significant shortcomings, and some of them are listed as listed below:
1. Usually, the abstract of a reader-friendly, scientific review article is the ‘independent and summary’ of the whole investigation; this is a MANDATORY criterion of writing an article of any kind. Unfortunately, the current version of the abstract does not satisfy the criterion, as stated above. This is one of the major shortcomings of this article. Moreover, some unnecessary words/phrases/sentences have been included in the abstract, which are suitable elsewhere but not in the abstract.
2. The next important and most vital part of an article is the ‘introduction’. It is generally treated as the ‘heart’ of an article. The introduction part usually guides the flow of the rest of the article’s parts. So, a question naturally arises on how to construct the introduction? It is a significant event for a good and well-organized scientific article. To address the above question, it is required to survey the existing literature on the subject matter of the article extensively, and this kind of literature survey will help authors to reveal the ‘research gap or originality’ within the existing literature. Once the ‘research gap’ is identified, then the rest of the article MUST be devoted to filling up the ‘research gap’ as identified. Unfortunately, the ‘introduction’ of this article has not written as highlighted above. Without revealing the ‘research gap’ systematically, any kind of research has no scientific value in reality! It is quite difficult to find out the necessity of this research and how much research had been done till date so far and what is left for future research by the scientists and researchers. Noting is found in this article in a symmetrical manner. Hence, this is another severe shortcoming of this article!
3. The theoretical MUST be written rigorously, which is absent in this article.
4. The conclusion part MUST also be precise and straightforward as an abstract so that the potential readers can easily understand the events (1) as mentioned above along with major observations of the article which is valid under certain range of pertinent parameters. Again, the ‘conclusion’ part is not written as expected. Besides, the ‘conclusion’ must have consistency with the abstract; this is a common practice of writing a reader-friendly scientific article. Hence, a major revision is necessary as suggested above.
5. This article has much more anomalies, and it is the authors’ responsibility to figure out all of them and address them accordingly.
Anyway, please wait for the comments from the editorial office.
Author Response
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Reviewer 3 Report
The research on the height of the fire smoke layer under the condition of forced ventilation is of great significance. To study the influence of air supply volume and air outlet height on cabin fires, engine room fire experiments under different forced air conditions are carried out through theoretical analysis methods. Various experimental conditions, for example, the increase of the air supply air volume, the ignition source mass loss rate, and the height of the smoke layer, an empirical formula for the height of the smoke layer under different air supply conditions is proposed. And a smoke layer height prediction model is also presented. However, I have some question on the paper as the following description.
1. The evaluation indictor for a method performance is important, and I don’t clear how to verify the method in an experiment, only mass loss rate. It seems that authors should further explain this problem except for the mass loss rate, and we only can see Figure 4-6 and Equation 1, 2.
2. Experimental data should be described in detailed. For example, how to get data, data characteristic, etc.
3. In experimental installation, see Figure 1 and Figure 2, we don’t clear the relationship between this equipment and the experiment. We cannot find this equipment plat how to provide a data source of the experimental results.
4. Equation (11), (13), and (14) are unclear, especially definition of variables.
5. How to get some constants and parameter values shown in Table 2? These values can only made available for this experiment?
6. English grammar and writing can be improved further.
Author Response
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Reviewer 4 Report
I have the following comments on the paper submitted:
1. In lines 115 and 116, the authors state that the exhaust air volume corresponds to 0.9 times the supply air, referring to the existing ventilation system. The authors should explain the reason for such an air discharge ratio. In conventional systems, the volume of exhaust air is often greater than the volume of air supplied.
2. In lines 117 and others, the authors characterize the fire source for the experiment (fuel heptane, diameter of the fire source 40 cm, and amount of heptane 3.5 l). The authors should justify in the article why they chose this type, the amount of fuel, and the diameter of the fire.
3. The authors should explain the course of the non-standard temperature at 260 s in Figure 8. Vertical temperature change of 1# thermocouple tree (?? = 2.058 ?3/?).
4. Many symbols used are not explained in the text. Authors should rigorously check all symbols used and complete the symbol legend.
5. In lines 334 and onward, the authors state that the derived theoretical method in relation to the realized experiment shows deviations of less than 11 % and the prediction by the used model is good. Authors should explain in more detail when deviations are good and when they are not. Where is the line between acceptability, or inadmissibility, deviations?
Author Response
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Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
Accept in present form
Author Response
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Reviewer 2 Report
Please wait for the comments from the editorial office.
Author Response
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Reviewer 3 Report
I have some suggestion:
1) Although the specific line layout and data collection methods used in this experiment are common methods in fire tests, but you should have better to explain how to obtain a data source of the latter experiments.
2) Most of methods for fire smoke layer height are suitable for the processing of temperature data. This study calculate the change of the height of the smoke layer according to the minimum integral ratio method. Why? Please explain the advatage of the propsoed mehtod compared to the former mehtod.
Author Response
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