Effects of Curing Pressure on the Long-Term Strength Retrogression of Oil Well Cement Cured under 200 °C
, Bo Zhou 1, Zhongfei Liu 1, Zhongtao Yuan 1, Zhi Zhang 1, Zhengqing Ai 1, Xueyu Pang 2,3,* and Xiaolin Liu 4
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Very nice and extensive work. Long term experimental results will be very valuable to the readers. The presentation can be improved and made more useful for the readers by adding a brief gist (main lesson learnt) to each figure caption instead of just a description of the figure plot.
There are some minor grammar and spelling mistakes. The formatting also needs some work.
Author Response
Dear Editor,
Thank you for your email dated July 18, 2022 enclosing the reviewers’ comments. We have carefully reviewed the comments on our manuscript entitled “ Effects of curing pressure on the long-term strength retrogression of oil well cement cured under 200 ºC ” and have revised the manuscript accordingly. Our responses are given in a point-by-point manner below. Changes to the manuscript are shown in red.
Review 1
Very nice and extensive work. Long term experimental results will be very valuable to the readers. The presentation can be improved and made more useful for the readers by adding a brief gist (main lesson learnt) to each figure caption instead of just a description of the figure plot.
There are some minor grammar and spelling mistakes. The formatting also needs some work.
Response: Thanks for your kind suggestions. We have changed the caption of the figures to exhibit our viewpoint more clearly. Changes to the manuscript are shown in red. And we have rechecked the grammar, spelling and formatting thoroughly.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.docx
Reviewer 2 Report
- Naming of samples (T1-T5) makes it hard to remember the differences/follow the discussion at points
-Figure 3 and 5 need better figure captions to make it possible to understand the figures (if one does not have detailed knowledge of MIP, XRD, TGA)
-New results, such as SEM should not be presented in the discussion
-For the second case, with high pressure curing little information is gained, except for a very long time perspective. But as no data is collected between 2 and 360 days, one does not know wethere changes occur fast or slow
-In figure 9 and 11 the two cases are compared (at low pressure and 180 days and high pressure after 360 days). This makes no sense, as non of the parameters are the same, and no conclusion can be drawn from this. There is no way of knowing the status of the low pressure after 360 days (double the time) or the high pressure at 180 days (half time)
Author Response
Dear Editor,
Thank you for your email dated July 18, 2022 enclosing the reviewers’ comments. We have carefully reviewed the comments on our manuscript entitled “ Effects of curing pressure on the long-term strength retrogression of oil well cement cured under 200 ºC ” and have revised the manuscript accordingly. Our responses are given in a point-by-point manner below. Changes to the manuscript are shown in red.
Review 2
- Naming of samples (T1-T5) makes it hard to remember the differences/follow the discussion at points
Response: Thanks for your suggestions. We have added a brief explanatory note on slurries T1-T5 in section 2.2 to show the differences between them and the design principles. i.e.: Slurry T3 is the control. Compared with Slurry T3, slurry T1 has lower α-Al2O3 (5%); slurry T2 does not contain Nano-Fe2O3; slurry T4 has 6% latex fiber as reinforcement admixture; slurry T5 has 0.4% graphene as reinforcement admixture. In some of the test results presented, slurry composition played a very minor role, so it was not necessary to identify them. In the results that slurry composition played relatively more significant roles we have added note about their differences.
-Figure 3 and 5 need better figure captions to make it possible to understand the figures (if one does not have detailed knowledge of MIP, XRD, TGA)
Response: We have rewritten the captions of Figures 3 and 5 to better describe the meaning of the figures.
-New results, such as SEM should not be presented in the discussion
Response: We have changed the titles of sections 3 and 4. Discussion is now in Section 5.
-For the second case, with high pressure curing little information is gained, except for a very long time perspective. But as no data is collected between 2 and 360 days, one does not know whether changes occur fast or slow
Response: Indeed, we only had two series of tests for the ultra-high curing pressure case. This is due to specific project requirement. These long-term studies under ultra-high pressure are very time-consuming and costly to perform. We only had one equipment that can reach the ultrahigh curing pressure of 150 MPa. Therefore, we can only assume that the trend of change with time is similar to that at 50 MPa. This may be a reasonable assumption according to the various macroscopic and microscopic analyses results.
-In figure 9 and 11 the two cases are compared (at low pressure and 180 days and high pressure after 360 days). This makes no sense, as non of the parameters are the same, and no conclusion can be drawn from this. There is no way of knowing the status of the low pressure after 360 days (double the time) or the high pressure at 180 days (half time)
Response: This is essentially the same issue as the previous one. The curing durations employed in this project made it impossible to make direct comparisons for the long-term samples. Unfortunately, these tests cannot be changed now. However, according to the test results of this study and our previously published work, the long-term strength retrogression is an irreversible process. Therefore, it can be expected that the mechanical properties of the low pressure tests after 360 days would be lower than those at 180 days. Therefore, we can still draw some useful conclusions by doing such comparisons. We have added additional information in the figure captions to explain these comparions.
Author Response File: Author Response.docx
