Erosion, Mechanical and Microstructural Evolution of Cement Stabilized Coarse Soil for Embankments

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Please find the attached file for detailed comments and specific suggestions.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Comments on the Quality of English Language

The English is generally understandable; however, there are several grammatical errors, awkward phrasings, and inconsistencies in tense and terminology throughout the manuscript. Careful editing by a native or fluent English speaker is recommended to improve clarity, precision and overall readability.

Author Response

We sincerely thank the reviewer for their thorough evaluation and insightful comments, which have significantly helped us to improve the scientific rigor, clarity, and applicability of our work. We have addressed all the points raised and revised the manuscript accordingly. See attached file for detailed point-by-point responses.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

I appreciate the opportunity to review this manuscript. The paper is generally well organized. The results are interesting and they represent a good contribution to the general state-of-the-art in this important topic of soil erosion stabilization. However, several issues must be addressed before I can recommend the manuscript for acceptance.

1. English grammar: Even though the use of artificial intelligence is clearly detected in the wording of the manuscript, English grammar really needs to be improved toward the manuscript. In many sentences, it isn’t clear what the authors are trying to say, so I cannot accept the manuscript until this issue is solved. The authors must know that using AI isn’t valid unless they read the wording through, making sure everything makes sense and it is clear for readers to understand.
2. Keywords: Several keywords are already in the title, so the authors should chose different keywords. The main idea of having keywords is to provide additional words for search engines to be able to come up with this manuscript, in addition to what’s in the title.
3. Abstract: The authors need to include how the data collected were analyzed (statistical methods) and what level of uncertainty (error, %) was considered. In the statistical tests.
4. Introduction: There is a crucial statement that the authors write, saying that the only work done in the topic is the one published by Nussbaum and Colley [36]. However, doing a simple literature search I see several relevant research works that have been published (e.g. Prakash and Krishnamoorthy, 2023; al-Hadidi et al., 2019), that need to be incorporated in both the Introduction and Discussion of results. I also suggest that the authors look at the references cited in those studies and see if additional research can be included. Also, when the authors first mention cement stabilization, it would be useful for readers to include an image showing what the technique is or how it looks like when applied. Finally, most of the last paragraph corresponds to Methods; therefore, the authors should rewrite it and make sure to include (1) what the objective of the research is, (2) why is the research is needed, and (3) what the research questions or hypotheses are.
5. Material and Methods: The authors need to tell the readers where the Biskra region is (country, and location within the country); a map would help a lot and is recommended. However, the biggest issue with this section is that the authors present results herein; this section is solely for how the research was done, leaving results for the Results section. Therefore, the authors should rewrite the entire section accordingly, and include a sub-section with the statistical analyses. Bottomline, this section is for the readers to see what was done and where, what data was collected and how, and how the data was analyzed to respond to the research questions or prove the hypotheses. Needless to say, there are serious issues with the figures that need to be fixed.
6. Results and discussion: Never write acronyms in section titles (e.g. HET). There is a continuous problem with how the figures are explained in the text, as there is too much detail (e.g. eroded particles went up 30.5g, then went down, then went down, etc); the reader can see all this just by looking at the figures, so the authors need to redo the way they explain results. First, point the figures and explain the main significance of the results. Second, try to give an explanation why this happens. Third, compare your results to what was obtained in similar studies to put your results into perspective. Finally, provide management implications and recommendations for future research. This universal procedure for writing research papers isn’t present herein, and instead the authors show the results in a way that is extremely confusing for the readers to understand. Therefore, I recommend rewriting the entire section accordingly. Additionally, I recommend having all figures from Figure 4 with the same scale, so that the reader can see how each treatment went.
7. Conclusions: No comments.

Comments on the Quality of English Language

English must be improved before acceptance.

Author Response

We sincerely thank the reviewer for their thorough evaluation and insightful comments, which have significantly helped us to improve the scientific rigor, clarity, and applicability of our work. We have addressed all the points raised and revised the manuscript accordingly. See attached file for detailed point-by-point responses.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

This article aims to hydraulic, mechanical, and microstructural characteristics of the of the one kind soil before and after cement treatment along with its applicability in hydraulic earthworks. As the authors have well shown in introduction the method of soil stabilisation with cement is known and well studied from the point of view of its efficiency depending on the characteristics of soils and the amount of cement. This article does not contain new scientific dependencies and conclusions for this method of soil stabilisation. Therefore scientific soundness of this article is low. In a point of practical value, the article demonstrates a very good methodological approach as well as a large number of well-executed studies for one soil.

Therefore, the conclusions drawn can only be valid for one selected soil. In addition, it should be noted the poor quality of the graphical material presented, namely:

1. Figure 1 C and D – there is no description of soil and cement phase designations; the designation ‘2-Theta [°]’ is better labelled as ‘2Ɵ (CuKα)’.
2. Figure 4 and 5 – you need to add the description ‘i’ and ‘m(g)’.
3. Figure 8 E – what is «c'» and «ϕ'».
4. Figure 9 – all lines must be labelled/marked.
5. Figure 11 – the same unit of measurement ‘mm’ or ‘μm’ must be used.
6. CONCLUSIONS – The authors did not correctly compare the results of other researchers, as the optimum cement content for stabilisation depends significantly on the nature of the soil. The authors did not set such goals in the article. Therefore, the conclusions about the optimum amount of cement may apply to one soil selected for the study.

Author Response

We sincerely thank the reviewer for their thorough evaluation and insightful comments, which have significantly helped us to improve the scientific rigor, clarity, and applicability of our work. We have addressed all the points raised and revised the manuscript accordingly. See attached file for detailed point-by-point responses.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Thanks to the authors for the revision of their paper.

Author Response

Comment: Thanks to the authors for the revision of their paper.

Response: We would like to deeply thank you for your comments and time to review our work, making possible to improve it a lot. Best regards.

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Dear authors,

Thank your for addressing my comments. I believe there has been sufficient improvement for acceptance. However, there is one more detail that needs to be address before approval, which is on Figure 6; now that all charts are under the same scale, it is extremely hard for readers to see fluctuations when values are very small. Therefore, I respectfully ask the authors to have the ordinates of figures a, b, c, and d on logaritymic scale or similar, and like this the reader will be able to see how different treatments really behave. After this is addressed, I can go ahead and recommend acceptance. 

I thank the authors for the patiences and I am confident that they understand that this is just for them to publish a good paper.

Comments on the Quality of English Language

None.

Author Response

Comment: Dear authors, Thank your for addressing my comments. I believe there has been sufficient improvement for acceptance. However, there is one more detail that needs to be address before approval, which is on Figure 6; now that all charts are under the same scale, it is extremely hard for readers to see fluctuations when values are very small. Therefore, I respectfully ask the authors to have the ordinates of figures a, b, c, and d on logaritymic scale or similar, and like this the reader will be able to see how different treatments really behave. After this is addressed, I can go ahead and recommend acceptance. I thank the authors for the patiences and I am confident that they understand that this is just for them to publish a good paper.

Response: We would like to deeply thank you for your comments and time to review our work, making possible to improve it a lot. Best regards. We agree with the highlighted on the scale of Figure 6, thus, we have improved the ordinates using log scale for better readability, it really improved the data exposition. Find in the revised manuscript highlighted in green.